A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 


A   THEORY    O 
CIVILISATION 


BY 

SHOLTO   O.    G.    DOUGLAS 


NEW  YORK 

THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

1914 


(All  rights  reserved) 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION      .....         7 
PART   I 

CHAPTER 

I.  ANCIENT  GREECE  .  .  .  -31 

II.  EARLY  ROMAN  CIVILISATION       .  .  .60 

III.  THE  AUGUSTAN  AGE       .  .  .  .80 

IV.  THE  DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION  .       93 
V.  THE  DARK  AGES             .            .            .  .112 

VI.     THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS   .  .  -136 


PART  II 

I.     ANCIENT  EGYPT   .            .            .  .  .     157 

II.     BUDDHISM             .            .            .  .  .176 

III.  ISLAM        .             .             .             .  .  192 

IV.  CONFUCIANISM      .....     206 
V.    ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU      .  .  .217 

CONCLUSION          .            .            .  .  .237 

5 

298680 


A  Theory  of  Civilisation 


INTRODUCTION 

WHY  did  the  civilisation  of  ancient  Greece  and 
Rome  decay  and  die  ?  That  is  a  question  which 
must  occur  to  every  mind  that  studies  the 
history  of  classical  civilisation^  Why  did  that 
former  period  of  knowledge  and  culture,  of  vast 
intellectual  and  artistic  achievement,  fail  to  pass 
by  a  direct  path  of  ascent  into  our  modern 
civilisation  ?  We  know  that  there  were  intel- 
lects at  work  in  the  world  then  which  were  not 
separated  by  any  real  gulf  of  difference  from 
the  intellects  that  have  crowned  our  modern 
civilisation.  In  every  purely  intellectual  point 
the  great  men  of  that  period  were  not  inferior 
to  the  great  men  of  modern  times— or,  at  any 
rate,  were  not  utterly  inferior  to  them.  In 
poetry—epic,  lyric,  dramatic— Greece  and  Rome 
have  left  us  models  which  we  have  barely  sur- 
passed. In  sculpture  we  have  never  reached 


8  :          A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

'the  perfection- bf 'Greece.  Of  classical  painting 
we  possess  next  to  nothing,  and  we  know  so 
little  that  it  would  be  rash  to  claim  for  the 
modern  world  an  overwhelming  superiority  of 
craftsmanship.  In  architecture  we  may  look 
proudly  on  Chartres  or  Ely  ;  but,  with  thoughts 
of  the  Parthenon  and  of  the  temples  of 
Paestum,  we  dare  not  claim  an  intrinsic 
superiority  for  Christian  architecture.  And 
even  in  the  latter  days  of  the  great  epoch  of 
Greco-Roman  civilisation,  Tacitus,  that  most 
perfect  craftsman  of  prose  literature,  gave  the 
world  in  his  Annals  a  work  that  some  of  us 
may  well  think  has  never  been  equalled. 

Why  did  this  civilisation  collapse  utterly,  as 
though  the  superstructure  was  too  heavy  for 
the  foundation? 

The  advancing  waves  of  barbarism,  we  are 
told,  broke  through  the  barriers,  and  spread 
like  a  rising  tide  of  savagery  over  the  Roman 
world.  Yes,  but  why  did  that  happen  at  this 
period?  Have  we  any  real  reason— a  reason, 
that  is,  that  we  have  not  reached  ex  post 
facto— tor  supposing  that  barbarian  Power  was 
greater  in  the  fourth  and  following  centuries 
of  our  era  than  in  the  hundred  years  that  centre 
round  the  principate  of  Augustus?  We  read 
of  the  irresistible  stream  of  immigration  pour- 


INTRODUCTION  9 

ing  in  from  the  east,  and  beating  upon  the 
barriers  of  the  Empire.  Yet  the  Byzantine 
Empire,  which  might  seem  to  have  been  more 
at  the  mercy  of  the  barbarians,  succeeded  in 
keeping  a  tottering  head  above  the  waves  for 
yet  another  thousand  years.  Indeed,  every 
reader  knows  that  this  is  not  a  sufficient  and 
convincing  answer.  We  all  know  that  Roman 
civilisation  was  rotten  to  the  core  ;  that  the 
evil  came  from  within,  not  from  without ;  that 
the  Roman  world  was  weakening  all  the  time, 
and  could  at  last  do  nothing  against  barbarians 
whom  Caesar  and  his  legions  would  have  swept 
away  like  chaff. 

It  has  been  the  same  with  every  civilisation 
that  has  been  evolved  in  the  countless  ages  of 
written  and  unwritten  history.  Greece  and 
Rome  only  followed  in  the  tracks  of  Nineveh 
and  Babylon.  Does  the  same  fate  lie  before 
us  in  spite  of  the  seeming  strength  and 
solidarity  of  the  civilisation  that  to-day  is  en- 
compassing all  the  world?  No  doubt,  to  any 
unimportant  provincial  governor  of  classical 
Rome,  the  idea  that  Roman  civilisation  could 
pass  away,  and  melt  into  the  barbarism  which 
we  find,  say,  in  the  seventh  century  would  have 
N  seemed  preposterous  j  in  just  the  same  way  it 
would  seem  preposterous  to  a  modern  colonial 


10  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

governor  that  the  totality  of  modern  civilisa- 
tion could  fade  within  a  few  centuries  into  a 
soulless,  unproductive  savagery.  Yet  that  is 
what  happened  to  Rome,  and  that  is  what 
analogy  tells  us  may  happen  to  our  own 
culture. 

Now  can  we  form  any  notion — however 
tentative  and  falsified  by  misconception— why 
all  the  earlier  civilisations  have  thus  passed 
away,  leaving  only  dead  sepulchral  fruits  for 
antiquarian  scholars  of  a  later  age?  The 
answer  to  that  question  must  be  of  interest  to 
us,  because  from  it  we  may  hope  to  see  whether 
the  same  forces  of  dissolution  are  working 
amongst  us  which  dissolved  those  earlier 
civilisations. 

But  the  question  cannot  be  answered  in  a 
few  words  of  conclusive  demonstration.  If 
that  were  so,  the  answer  would  have  been 
found,  studied,  discussed  long  ago  in  all  its 
endless  ramifications  by  the  great  intellects  that 
have  preceded  us.  For  no  philosopher,  no 
biologist,  no  anthropologist  could  have  failed 
to  take  an  interest  in  the  road  up  which 
mankind  is  toiling. 

If  we  look  with  a  pervasive  eye  at  the  history 
of  the  European  world  during  the  last  two 
thousand  years,  three  things  appear  to  stand 


INTRODUCTION  11 

out  as  the  central  pivots  round  which  the 
individual  events  may  be  grouped  conveniently. 

First,  the  spread  of  the  Greco -Roman  power 
and  civilisation,  which,  after  reaching  a  climax, 
fell  into  decrepitude  and  death. 

Second,  the  birth,  growth,  and  ultimate  dis- 
semination of  the  Christian  faith. 

Third,  that  renewal  of  civilisation  whose 
commencement  has  by  common  consent  been 
called  the  Renaissance  :  the  term,  of  course, 
implies  rightly  or  wrongly  that  our  modern 
civilisation  is  essentially  a  re -birth  of  the 
Greco -Roman  civilisation. 

Let  us  try  to  see  whether  any  causal  connec- 
tion can  be  traced  between  these  three  leading 
events. 

It  is  at  once  obvious  that  the  birth  and 
growth  of  Christianity  synchronise  to  a  remark- 
able degree  with  the  climacteric  point  and  the 
beginning  of  the  decay  of  the  Roman  empire. 

We  must  be  careful  here  not  to  let  the  wide 
range  of  our  modern  point  of  view  mislead 
us.  We  have  all  heard  in  our  childhood  that 
Christ  came  into  the  world  exactly  at  the 
moment  when  the  events  of  Roman  history 
were  most  singularly  favourable  to  the  dissemi- 
nation of  the  Christian  faith.  That  is  true. 
But,  looking  at  this  statement  with  the  un- 


12  A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

prejudiced  eye  of  logic,  we  can  see  that  it  is 
also  possible  to  express  the  same  truth  from 
the  other  side,  and  say  that  when  events 
became  ripe  for  the  promulgation  of  a  new 
religion,  a  new  religion  arose  which  we  happen 
to  know  by  the  name  of  Christianity.  It  seems 
easier  to  accept  the  latter  statement,  which  is 
rational,  than  the  former,  which  is  ultra- 
rational.  Darwinian  philosophy  has  shown  us 
that  secular  change  is  the  necessary  concomi- 
tant of  individual  life  ;  for  every  individual, 
from  the  highest  man  to  the  lowest  zoophyte, 
varies  from  every  other  individual,  and  the 
resultant  of  countless  variations  must  itself 
vary. 

Perhaps  we  may  say  that  a  higher  type, 
therefore,  necessarily  continues  to  come  into 
existence  in  aeternum.  Changes  in  tempera- 
ture, in  humidity,  in  the  composition  of  the 
atmosphere,  are  so  gradual  from  day  to  day, 
from  year  to  year,  from  century  to  century, 
from  aeon  to  aeon,  that  it  may  be  that  some 
type  of  life  will  evolve  itself  to  meet  the  most 
extreme  conditions  that  we  can  imagine  :  but 
such  speculations  must  remain  purely  hypo- 
thetical for  us.  Coming  back  to  that  which 
concerns  humanity  more  closely,  let  us  try  to 
see  what  it  is  that  marks  out  the  man  of  the 


INTRODUCTION  13 

first  century— or  of  the  twentieth  century— from 
the  man  of  the  seventh  century.  The  distinc- 
tion, to  which  attention  especially  is  called 
here,  is  the  loss  of  religious  faith.  It  is  clear 
from  the  literature  of  the  first  century  that 
then  Rome  no  longer  possessed  the  old  faith 
in  the  old  gods  of  Olympus.  The  Romans  no 
longer  possessed  the  psychic  illusion  of  their 
ancestors.  The  result  of  this  loss  was  a 
slackening  of  the  obligations  of  morality.  The 
man  who  in  earlier  days  ha.d  faith  in  the  reality 
of  the  Olympian  hierarchy  necessarily  was 
guided  in  his  conduct  by  that  faith ;  and, 
so  far  as  that  Olympian  faith  taught  a  higher 
morality  than  that  of  obedience  to  physical 
appetite,  thus  far  the  gods  of  Olympus  guided 
the  individual  believer  in  them  to  take  his 
stand  upon  a  higher  plane  ;  and  so  we  are 
not  incorrect  in  using  the  expression  analogic- 
ally that  the  soul  of  Ro'me  was  of  a  higher 
nature  than  the  soul  of  Gaul  or  Britain. 

Is  it  not  this  psychic  illusion  which  dis- 
tinguishes the  progressive  nation  from  that 
which  we  call  the  unprogressive-^unprogres- 
sive  by  comparison,  that  is — because  any 
progress  that  may  be  taking  place  in  its 
development  is  so  slow  that  we  cannot  trace 
its  effects  in  historical  action?  As  the  loss  of 


14  A   THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

this  psychic  illusion  synchronises  sufficiently 
closely  with  the  apparent  decay  of  Roman 
civilisation,  we  may  accept  the  conclusion,  not 
as  proved  but  as  probable,  that  the  loss  of 
faith  was  connected  in  some  way  with  the 
failure  of  progress. 

With  a  decay  of  faith  in  the  verity  of  the 
Olympian  myths  the  Roman  lost  the  guiding 
principle  which  had  led  him  to  stand  upon 
a  higher  plane  than  his  barbarous  neighbours. 
There  is  no  question  here  of  claiming  any 
supernatural  spiritual  truth  for  the  myths  of 
Greece  and  Rome  :  it  is  a  mere  statement  of 
a  materialistic  evolutionary  theory.  With  the 
loss  of  his  psychic  illusion  each  individual,  in 
his  own  conduct,  acted  under  influences  of 
physical  appetite,  which  were  in  no  way 
superior  to  the  influences  that  worked  upon 
the  neighbouring  barbarian ;  indeed,  fre- 
quently the  Roman  was  under  inferior  influ- 
ences, because,  where  the  Roman  had  lost  his 
old  faith,  and  had  no  new  faith  to  take  its 
place,  the  barbarian  had  for  the  most  part 
some  psychic  illusion,  which,  however  inferior 
to  the  Olympian  verities,  was,  at  any  rate, 
superior  to  the  nullity  of  the  new  Roman 
atheism  or  agnosticism. 

Now,  if  there  is  any  truth  underlying  these 


INTRODUCTION  15 

theoretical  possibilities^  before  any  group  of 
human  beings  could  rise  from  the  dust  and 
ashes  of  the  dead  Roman  civilisation  to  a  plane 
equal  in  height  to  that  of  the  old  civilisation, 
it  was  necessary  for  the  soul  of  that  group  , 
to  find  faith  in  some  psychic  illusion  which 
could  give  the  individual  as  high  a  guidance 
as  the  old  Olympian  belief.  The  potentialities 
of  such  faith  and  of  such  psychic  illusion 
existed  then,  as  at  other  times,  in  the  countless 
superstitions  of  uncivilised  humanity. 

To  use  a  convenient,  but  unscientific, 
analogy,  the  spirit  of  evolution  had  only 
to  choose  the  best  of  these  multitudinous 
superstitions  and  to  educate  it  to  play  its  part 
in  the  upward  development  of  man.  Evolu- 
tion was  capable  of  making  the  choice.  It 
had  to  choose,  not  merely  that  which  was  best 
per  se,  but  that  which  was  best  relatively  to 
the  possibilities  of  its  dissemination  as  far  and 
as  widely  as  might  be,  and  especially  with 
reference  to  the  possibilities  of  working  up  the 
best  material  to  be  found  in  the  world  ;  and 
this  material  lay  in  the  old  empire  of  Rome, 
because  Rome  under  the  old  Olympian  dis- 
pensation had  risen  to  a  height  never  rea'ched 
elsewhere,  and  that  had  left  in  the  brain - 
material  of  the  inhabitants  the  potentiality  of 
a  superior  and  speedier  growth. 


10  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

No  doubt  evolution  made  trial  of  many 
faiths  before  it  found  that  which  it  sought, 
just  as  evolution  may  be  said  to  make  many 
trials  before  it  finds  the  desirable  variation  in 
the  animal  that  will  lead  to  a  higher  species. 
It  found  the  desirable  faith  in  Judaea.  From 
the  almost  elementary  facts  of  the  life  of  Christ 
was  evolved  the  fabric  of  mediaeval  Chris- 
tianity. In  this  new  faith  mankind  found  the 
new  psychic  illusion,  which  could  take  the  place 
of  the  dead  or  moribund  Olympian  fables. 

But  it  was  long  before  the  descendants  of 
the  men  of  the  outworn  Roman  world  reached 
that  lowly,  unsophisticated  condition  of  mind 
in  which  they  could  accept  generally  and  un- 
reservedly the  new  psychic  illusion.  It  was 
not  till  about  three  centuries  after  the  death 
of  Christ  that  the  world  found  a  Christian 
emperor  in  Constantine.  And  even  then  there 
were  still  sparks  glowing  in  the  embers  ;  Julian 
the  Apostate,  for  instance,  vainly  sought  to 
reinstate  Olympian  paganism. 

The  new  faith  differed  from  the  old  in  being 
essentially  monotheistic  ;  to  this  extent  it  was 
possible  for  a  thinking  mind  to  accept  the 
notion  of  a  Christian  theocracy.  But  mean- 
while the  disruption  of  the  Roman  autocracy 
over  Europe  and  the  neighbouring  shores  of 


INTRODUCTION  17 

the  Mediterranean  had  let  in  the  barbaric 
invaders.  Goths  and  Mongols  swelled  the 
ranks  of  the  sons  of  Romulus,  and  united 
themselves  by  the  closest  ties  to  the  patrician 
families  of  Rome.  So  Roman  intellectuality 
sank  lower  as  the  last  tatters  of  the  Olympian 
civilisation  were  disintegrated  to  dust,  while 
the  dawn  of  the  new  faith  was  beginning  to 
spread  its  light  upon  mankind. 

Our  fathers  were  not  deep  thinkers  in  the 
Dark  Ages,  the  ages  of  faith  ;  that  is  why  they 
were  ages  of  faith  ;  that  is  why  the  new  psychic 
illusion  came  to  dominate  European  humanity. 
As  the  work  of  construction  tends  always  to 
be  slower  than  the  work  of  destruction,  the 
work  of  reconstructing  the  Roman  civilisa- 
tion was  a  slower  process  than  its  dissolution. 
The  accession  of  Hildebrand  to  the  papacy 
sometimes  is  taken  as  a  convenient  date  from 
which  to  count  the  birth  of  the  modern  world  ; 
but  it  is  only  in  the  thirteenth  century  that 
we  can  trace  with  unhesitating  certainty  the 
arrival  of  the  new  civilisation,  the  Christian 
civilisation,  which  was  soon  to  prove  more 
glorious  than  the  Olympian  civilisation  of 
earlier  days. 

It  was  fitting,  perhaps  we  may  say  inevit- 
able, that  the  Christian  civilisation  should  first 

2 


18  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

come  into  prominence  in  Italy,  the  old  home 
of  its  precursor,  rather  than  in  Judaea,  the  land 
of  its  birth,  for— on  the  principle  that  a  prophet 
is  not  without  honour  save  in  his  own  country 
—the  Jews  saw  too  much  of  the  real  Christ  to 
accept  His  divinity  ;  it  was  only  at  a  distance 
from  the  historical  home  of  its  founder  that  the 
great  psychic  illusion  could  find  its  necessary 
environment.  And  Judaea  was  farther  from 
Rome  then  than  it  is  now  ;  and  the  distance 
continued  to  increase  as  the  means  of  com- 
munication became  less  efficient  with  the 
decrease  of  civilisation. 

After  its  long  period  of  re-educating  man- 
kind the  Christian  faith  brought  forth  the  new 
civilisation  in  the  glories  of  the  Renaissance. 
In  Italy  this  brilliant  epoch  of  the  human  soul 
reached  its  meridian  splendour  in  the  times 
of  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent  and  Leo  X. 
During  the  papacy  of  Clement  VII  we  see  the 
swiftly  rising  shades  of  a  coming  darkness. 
But  outside  Italy  events  had  marched  more 
slowly.  We  may  take  the  death  of  Shakes- 
peare, in  i  6 1 6,  as  marking  the  commencement 
of  the  decline  in  England. 

Then  an  interesting  state  of  affairs  arises  ; 
for  the  decline  is  not  continuous.  Christian 
civilisation  does  not  sink  down  again  into  the 


INTRODUCTION  19 

depths.  On  the  contrary,  after  a  compara- 
tively brief  period  of  decay  it  commences  to 
rise  again,  and  reaches  that  gorgeous  point 
in  which  we  find  ourselves  living  at  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century. 

At  the  first  glance  this  might  seem  to  kill  the 
theory  of  the  causes  of  civilisation,  which  it  is 
the  purpose  of  this  book  to  explain.  But  that 
is  not  so,  for  a  very  little  thought  shows  us 
that  at  the  moment  when  the  first  Christian 
civilisation,  the  Catholic  civilisation,  was  in  all 
the  glory  of  its  zenith,  a  new  form  of  psychic 
illusion,  which  alone  could  regenerate  man- 
kind, already  was  advancing  to  a  prominent 
position  in  the  thoughts  of  men.  Protestantism 
was  evolving  itself  into  the  new  religion  that 
was,  by  its  new  illusion,  to  lead  humanity  to 
higher  heights  than  ever  had  been  reached 
before.  The  Protestant  civilisation,  for  reasons 
that  we  need  not  here  discuss,  took  a  scientific 
and  mechanical  turn.  We  need  not  suppose 
that  contemporary  mechanical  ingenuity  points 
to  any  superiority  in  contemporary  brains  over 
those  of  earlier  civilised  men.  It  would  be, 
indeed,  absurd  to  imagine  that  the  men  who 
appreciated  Plato's  Republic  when  it  was  first 
written  were  so  stupid  that  some  of  them  could 
not  have  been  taught  easily  to  run  a  motor-car 


20  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

or  a  printing-machine.  But  the  mechanical 
bias  of  Protestant  civilisation  had  an  interesting 
and  important  result  in  its  application  to  loco- 
motion, for  this  caused  a  vast  extension  of  its 
power  of  influence.  It  caused  the  Protestant 
civilisation  to  react  with  powerful  effect  upon 
the  neighbouring  moribund  Catholic  civilisa- 
tion and  ultimately  on  the  non-Christian 
communities,  which  otherwise  would  have  been 
beyond  its  reach. 

The  spirit  of  toleration  has  been  in  theory— 
though  not,  of  course,  always  in  practice — a 
distinctive  characteristic  of  the  Protestant 
rather  than  of  the  Catholic  civilisation.  And 
this,  also,  has  led  undoubtedly  to  an  increase 
in  its  influence  upon  peoples  external  to  it. 

It  is  of  interest  to  note  the  results  of  the 
Catholic  and  Protestant  civilisation  in  the 
settlement  of  America.  The  old  moribund 
Catholic  civilisation  was  planted  throughout  the 
Southern  continent :  the  young,  invigorating 
Protestant  civilisation  came  to  dominate  the 
North.  The  natural  advantages  of  the  two 
continents  are  not  very  dissimilar  ;  the  coast- 
lines correspond ;  the  river  systems  of  both 
are  extensive  ;  both  extend  practically  from 
equatorial  to  polar  regions.  So  we  can  con- 
tinue to  draw  parallels  until  we  study  the 


INTRODUCTION  21 

political  history  of  the  inhabitants.  There  the 
contrast  is  conclusive.  And  why?  Surely 
because  the  minds  of  the  men  who  colonised 
the  North  were,  for  the  most  part,  under  the 
influence  of  the  Protestant  psychic  illusion, 
the  men  of  the  Southern  continent  were  under 
the  influence  of  the  decadent  Catholicism. 

And  now  we  may  turn  to  the  question  of  the 
immediate  future,  a  most  interesting  question 
at  all  times,  to  all  men.  To  what  goal  are  we 
marching  with  the  march  of  civilisation  ?  Are 
we  indeed  ascending  or  descending? 

In  answering  that  question  we  must  be  closely 
on  our  guard  against  forming  grand  conclu- 
sions upon  trivial  and  transient  phenomena. 
Imagine  a  straw  floating  on  the  surface  of  the 
open  sea  while  the  tide  is  ebbing  on  a  rough 
day.  The  straw  rises  again  and  again  on 
countless  waves,  although  it  is  still  falling  with 
the  falling  tide,  and  must  descend  inevitably 
to  whatever  level  the  water  finally  reaches.  If 
that  straw  could  think  and  speak,  we  may  sup- 
pose that  it  would  tell  us,  as  it  climbed  some 
huge  wave,  that  it  was  ascending,  and  would 
arrive  ultimately  at  some  unseen,  unknown 
goal  on  high.  It  might  well  seem  so  to  the 
straw,  yet  it  would  not  be  so  in  fact.  Now  we 
are  in  the  position  of  that  straw.  We,  as  indi- 


22  A  THEORY  OF    CIVILISATION 

viduals,  have  no  more  effect  on  the  trend  of 
things,  on  the  tide  of  human  progress,  than 
that  straw. 

It  has  been  suggested  tentatively  above  that 
civilisation  always  has  been  connected  insepar- 
ably with  some  antecedent  psychic  illusion  ;  it 
is  further  suggested  that  this  is  an  inevitable 
law  of  the  existence  of  civilisation.  Thus  civi- 
lisation only  exists  as  the  resultant  of  faith. 
From  this  it  follows  that  the  decay  of  faith 
leads  to  the  decay  of  civilisation— that  civilisa- 
tion must  fade,  and  die,  and  decay,  if  faith  has 
previously  faded,  and  died,  and  decayed. 

And  so  the  all-important  question  for  the 
prophet  of  the  outcome  of  Christian  civilisation 
is  this  :  Is  Christianity  a  living  and  growing 
faith,  or  is  Christianity  a  system  of  extraordi- 
nary historic  interest  with  regard  to  which 
men's  faith  is  moribund,  which  all  men  will 
be  content  soon  to  class  as  a  mere  psychic 
illusion  ? 

It  would  seem  that  our  civilisation,  too,  must 
fade  and  fall.  The  size  of  our  civilisation  may 
make  the  dissolution  slow,  slower  than  that  of 
the  Olympian  civilisation. 

The  prophecy  of  dates  is  a  most  fantastic 
hypothesis.  But  perhaps  we  may  picture 
our  descendants  of  \.n.  3000  as  down  in 


INTRODUCTION  23 

such  depths  as  the  sons  of  Rome  reached 
in  A.D.  1000.  Then  somewhere  in  the  world 
the  new  psychic  illusion  must  rise  to  power. 
Its  coming  is  certain,  because  only  from  it  can 
follow  the  new  civilisation.  And  that  new 
civilisation  must  come,  as  the  result  of  those 
evolutionary  laws  which  are  older  far  than 
humanity  itself.  It  is  as  inevitable  as  to- 
morrow's sunrise.  To  what  height  man  ulti- 
mately may  climb,  in  the  illimitable  vistas  of 
endless  civilisations  following  endless  and  ever 
higher  psychic  illusions,  we  cannot  even  faintly 
imagine  in  our  wildest  dreams. 

The  theory,  then,  which  this  book  seeks  to 
elucidate,  of  the  causation  of  civilisation  and 
decivilisation,  amounts  to  something  of  this 
sort. 

We  will  take  as  an  accepted  fact  that,  in  the 
course  of  long  ages,  the  almost  primitive 
human  animal  has  evolved  for  itself  a  certain 
degree  of  intelligence.  With  that  intelligence 
comes  a  certain  fear  of  the  unseen,  of  the 
unknown,  of  inexplicable  things  :  man  comes 
to  dread  the  thunder,  the  great  winds  and 
storms  which  so  often  bring  discomfort,  scar- 
city of  food,  death.  He  comes,  too,  to  have 
apprehension  of  the  unseen  power  of  the  dead, 
of  the  continuance  of  the  authority  of  some 


24  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

dead  leader.  The  individual,  or  the  com- 
munity, in  whom  such  thoughts  and  fears  are 
prevalent,  is  influenced  in  conduct  by  them. 

Here  we  have,  then,  a  primitive  psychic 
illusion.  These  influences  may  tend  towards 
conduct  which  we  now  call  superior,  or  they 
may  tend  towards  conduct  which  we  would 
now  call  inferior.  Perhaps  we  may  say  that 
they  would  almost  always  tend  in  the  former 
direction,  and  that  for  two  reasons  :  firstly, 
because  superiority  of  conduct  would  seem 
really  to  be  only  the  name  which  we  give  to 
such  conduct  as  these  primitive  ancestors  of 
ours  were  led  to  pursue  ;  secondly,  so  far  as 
there  is  reality  in  the  superiority  of  a  superior 
morality,  so  far  there  would  always  be  a 
tendency  towards  the  elimination  of  the  inferior 
morality  on  the  principle  of  the  survival  of  the 
fittest.  Ultimately,  then,  under  either  alter- 
native the  outcome  would  tend  to  be  always  the 
survival  of  the  superior  morality. 

This  superior  morality  would  react  hygi- 
enically  both  upon  the  individual  and  also, 
similarly,  upon  the  community  collectively, 
tending  towards  a  higher  grade  of  intelligence  ; 
this  implies  also  a  higher  standard  of  civilisa- 
tion—if we  use  the  word  "  civilisation  "  analogi- 
cally to  include  the  primitive  advance  towards 


INTRODUCTION  25 

the  condition  which  we  in  later  times  can 
classify  definitely  as  civilisation.  This  superior 
condition  of  relatively  intelligent  civilisation 
would  be  necessarily  subsequent  to  the  spread 
of  a  psychic  illusion,  and  actually  resultant 
from  it. 

But  the  increase  of  intelligent  reflection 
would  then  lead  to  disillusion — that  is,  to  the 
decay  of  faith  in  the  psychic  illusion.  Thus 
the  increase  of  civilisation  would  lead  to  the 
decay  of  that  which  inspired  the  increase  of 
civilisation.  This  would  seem  to  bring  us  back 
again  to  the  starting-point. 

The  position,  however,  would  not  be  the 
same,  although  it  would  appear  to  be  super- 
ficially similar.  The  difference  would  be  in 
the  potentiality  of  increased  intelligence,  which, 
by  heredity,  would  be  existent  in  the  brains  of 
the  men  who  composed  the  community.  This 
would  be  true  whether  we  believe  that  evolu- 
tion had  worked  directly  upon  the  mental 
capacity  of  individuals  or  indirectly  by  the 
elimination  of  inferior  individuals  or  commu- 
nities. So,  when  a  new  psychic  illusion  began 
to  operate  upon  men,  it  would  find,  so  to  speak, 
its  work  easier ;  and  therefore  in  an  equal 
space  of  time,  it  would  tend  to  lead  to  a  higher 
state  of  civilisation  than  the  resultant  of  the 


26  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

previous  illusion.  Consequently  there  would 
be  a  tendency  for  a  new  civilisation  to  be  on  a 
higher  plane  thaji  its  parent  civilisation. 

The  collateral  ramifications  of  the  ascent  of 
civilisation  are  so  complex  that  we  need  feel 
no  surprise  when  historical  facts  do  not  appear 
to  tally  exactly  with  the  theoretical  or  ideal 
line  of  progress.  But,  as  it  happens,  in  our 
Western  Civilisation — to  use  Kidd's  well- 
known,  but  not  too  happy,  nomenclature— we 
have  a  very  normal  example  of  this  ideal  pro- 
gression. This  is  one  reason  why  it  is  useful 
to  make  a  special  study  of  this  Western  Civi- 
lisation. Another  reason  is  that  here  in  Eng- 
land we  are  apt  to  know  more  of  the  psychic 
illusion  under  which  we  were  born  and  bred, 
and  also  of  the  history  of  the  civilisation  in 
which  we  live. 

So  it  is  proposed  now  to  enter  in  some  detail 
into  the  consideration  of  the  two  psychic  illu- 
sions which  in  the  main  have  civilised  Europe 
—the  Olympian  illusion  and  the  Christian 
illusion— and  with  them  to  consider  the  evolu- 
tion of  the  two  resultant  civilisations  to  which 
reference  has  been  made  already  as  the  Olym- 
pian civilisation  and  the  Christian  civilisation. 
To  this  will  be  added  a  few  chapters  explana- 
tory of  the  connection  between  some  other 


INTRODUCTION  27 

forms  of  psychic  illusion  and  civilisation ; 
these,  it  is  hoped,  will  illustrate  the  more 
detailed  considerations  of  Roman  and  Christian 
civilisation. 


PART   I 


CHAPTER    I 
ANCIENT    GREECE 

IN  this  book  an  attempt  is  made  to  trace  the 
causes  that  have  produced  civilisation*  It  is 
evident  that  these  causes  must  lie  ultimately 
beyond  the  range  of  history,  for,  however  far 
back  we  may  trace  the  beginnings  of  that 
progress  by  which  men  have  advanced  from 
a  primitive  barbarism  to  a  condition  which  by 
analogy  we  may  call  incipient  civilisation,  we 
can  never  find  a  state  of  human  affairs  which 
was  not  the  resultant  of  a  previous  state  of 
affairs.  Thus  we  are  compelled  in  our 
ignorance  to  choose  by  an  artificial  con- 
vention some  definite  period  as  a  beginning, 
although  we  are  well  aware  that  the  period 
chosen  is  not  a  real  beginning  in  a  philo- 
sophic sense  of  the  word. 

It  is  clear  enough  that  the  civilisation  in 
which  we  are  living  to-day  may  be  traced  back 
through  the  period  of  the  Renaissance  and  the 

31 


32  A   THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

Middle  Ages  to  the  Roman  Empire.  From 
Rome  we  may  pass  to  Greece  and  the  culture 
which  seems  to  be  allied  so  closely  to  that 
of  Rome.  So  far,  if  we  are  content  with  wide 
generalities,  there  is  no  difficulty. 

But  when  we  try  to  see  what  lay  before  the 
Greek  civilisation  the  task  is  not  so  easy,  the 
outlook  is  not  so  clear.  In  Egypt,  in  Phoe- 
nicia, in  the  various  old  civilisations  of  Asia 
we  seem,  indeed,  to  see  a  light  that  may  guide 
us  to  a  true  knowledge  of  the  parentage  of 
Greek  culture ;  but  it  is  a  vague,  uncertain 
light,  and  soon  is  lost  in  darkness  and  doubt,. 
We  must,  then,  be  content  to  say  artificially 
that  our  civilisation  begins  on  the  shores  of 
the  Aegean,  not  because  we  believe  that  this 
is  a  true  beginning  but  because  it  is  in  Greece 
that  European  civilisation  certainly  has  its  most 
primitive  historical  source. 

So  many  learned  books  have  been  written 
about  Greek  civilisation  and  Greek  religion  that 
it  must  seem  presumptuous  for  a  writer  who 
assuredly  is  far  from  learned  to  step  boldly 
towards  a  gap  that  was  filled  up  long  ago. 
Yet  there  are  still  a  few  points  that  seem  to 
be  deserving  of  a  greater  emphasis  than  usually 
has  been  laid  upon  them. 

Greek  religion  may  be  considered  under  two 


ANCIENT   GREECE  33 

aspects,  the  mythological  and  the  eschato- 
logical.  About  Greek  mythology  there  is 
nothing  new  to  be  said  save  by  the  most  expert 
scholars,  for,  since  the  time  of  the  revival  of 
learning  in  the  Italian  Renaissance,  there  has 
been  no  lack  of  poets  and  students  to  keep 
the  memories  of  the  myths  of  Hellas  fresh  and 
vivid.  But  the  eschatological  problems  have 
been  considered  with  vigour  only  in  our  own 
day.  It  is  just  these  latter  problems  that  have 
the  chief  interest  for  us  in  our  consideration 
of  the  causes  of  the  evolution  of  Greek  civi- 
lisation. 

As  we  glance  over  the  course  of  early  Greek 
history  we  may  note  one  or  two  points  which 
stand  out  with  special  distinction.  We  see 
that  at  some  period  not  far  distant  from 
B.C.  1000  there  were  in  existence  several  im- 
portant cities  in  Greece  Proper,  of  which 
Mycenae  is  the  most  prominent.  These  were 
in  a  fairly  advanced  condition  of  civilisation. 
There  was,  also,  in  existence  an  important  city, 
Ilium  or  Troy,  in  the  north-west  corner  of  Asia 
Minor,  in  a  somewhat  similar  condition  of 
civilisation . 

At  some  date  certainly  earlier  than  700  B.C., 
probably  earlier  than  800  B.C.,  were  composed 
the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey,  poems  to  which 

3 


34  A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

reference  may  be  made  as  "  Homer,"  by  the 
usual  convention,  without  any  implications  as 
to  their  authorship.  Homer  entirely  is  con- 
cerned with  the  Trojan  War  and  events  that 
resulted  from  it. 

With  Homer  the  literature  of  Greece  com- 
mences :  with  him  we  connect  closely  the 
Homeric  Hymns  and  the  poems  of  Hesiod. 
But  after  these  Greek  literature  practically  is 
silent  until  we  come  to  the  time  of  Simonides 
(b.  556)  and  Anacreon  (fl.  530);  Alcaeus 
and  Sappho  may  be  a  little  earlier,  but  their 
work  has  come  down  to  us  in  a  quite  frag- 
mentary condition.  It  is  only  with  Pindar 
(b.  circ.  522),  Aeschylus  (b.  525),  and 
Herodotus  (b.  484)  that  we  come  to  the 
full  glory  of  Greek  literature.  These  few 
obvious  facts  with  regard  to  early  Greek  litera- 
ture are  given  here  because  it  seems  that 
frequently  too  little  stress  is  laid  on  the  occur- 
rence of  this  silent  period,  between  the  finished 
artistic  workmanship  of  Homer,  on  the  one 
hand,  and  the  equally  artistic,  but  very 
different,  work  of  the  fifth  century,  on  the 
other.  Greek  literature  is  treated  as  a  simple 
identity,  as  though  there  was  no  difficulty  at  all 
in  the  fact  that  Homer  and  Hesiod  could  write 
with  artistic  finish,  but  that  no  worthy  sue- 


ANCIENT   GREECE  35 

cessors  appeared  to  carry  on  the  Homeric 
tradition  until,  about  three  centuries  later,  the 
very  diverse,  and  in  some  ways  more  archaic, 
Aeschylus  gave  to  the  world  his  consummate 
tragedies,  whose  beauty  and  grandeur  fill  us 
with  wonder,  while  their  exasperating  difficulty 
fills  us— or  some  of  us— with  despair. 

Now  it  appears  fairly  obvious  that  the 
Homeric  poems  somehow  are  connected  with 
that  older  Mycenaean  civilisation  (we  might 
call  it  also  Pelasgian  :  it  is  said  to  form  a 
bond  of  union  between  Neolithic  times  and  our 
own  civilisation)  which  in  the  main  had  passed 
away  before  the  historic  Hellas,  with  Athens 
as  its  chief  glory,  is  revealed  to  us.  The 
Mycenaeans  are  not  the  same  as  the  Achaeans 
of  Homer— Professor  Ramsay  has  shown  this 
clearly  in  his  Early  Age  of  Greece.  At  what 
period  and  under  what  circumstances  the 
Mycenaeans  combined  with  the  Achaeans  to 
form  a  Mycenaean -Achaean  civilisation  we  do 
not  know  for  certain.  But  apparently  it  was 
such  a  combination  that  under  Agamemnon 
fought  in  the  Trojan  war. 

It  seems  desirable  to  lay  considerable 
emphasis  on  the  existence  of  a  gap  between 
the  civilisation  of  Homer  and  the  civilisation 
of  the  fifth  century,  between  Homeric  litera- 


36  A  THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

ture  and  Athenian  literature  ;  for  by  means 
of  it  we  may  come,  perhaps,  to  a  philosophic, 
generalised  notion  of  the  early  history  of  these 
peoples  round  the  Aegean  Sea. 

We  picture  to  ourselves,  then,  a  civilisation 
growing  up  in  Argolis  and  the  Troad,  which 
produced  ultimately,  as  its  chief  literary  fruit, 
the  poems  of  Homer.  It  produced  also,  no 
doubt,  other  poetic  fruits  that  are  lost— lost 
through  the  quite  normal  progress  of  this  early 
civilisation  into  decadence.  We  can  see  clearly 
that  some  poems  might  be  preserved,  un- 
written, by  rhapsodists,  through  a  time  when 
the  civilisation  that  had  produced  them  was 
decaying  round  them.  As  we  shall  see  in  a 
subsequent  chapter  when  we  are  considering 
an  analogous  condition  of  affairs,  even  the 
complete  decay  of  a  civilisation  would  not 
bring  the  people  who  formed  the  population 
of  the  country  into  a  position  exactly  similar 
to  that  which  their  ancestors  occupied  before 
the  rise  of  the  civilisation  ;  for  they  would 
bear  now  within  them,  through  heredity,  the 
potentiality  of  an  increased  degree  of  intellec- 
tuality. Thus,  if  an  exciting  stimulus,  even 
of  equal  strength,  could  be  brought  to  bear 
upon  them,  it  would  be  likely  to  goad  them 
to  a  height  of  civilisation  to  which  their 
ancestors  had  not  attained. 


ANCIENT   GREECE  37 

Leaving  aside  for  the  moment  the  nature 
of  this  stimulus,  let  us  think  of  the  way  it 
would  work,  of  the  effects  it  would  produce. 
We  would  expect  it  to  come  into  operation 
somewhere  on  the  outskirts  of  the  previous 
civilisation,  so  as  not  to  be  cut  off  entirely 
from  its  civilising  influence,  and  yet  not  to 
be  involved  fully  in  its  disillusionment  and 
decadence.  Athens  occupies  such  a  position 
with  regard  to  the  Mycenaean -Achaean  civili- 
sation. In  Homer  Athens  is  of  no  import- 
ance at  all ;  it  is  only  in  the  later  period  of 
the  fifth  century  that  she  appears  as  the  leading 
city  of  Greece  in  point  of  civilisation. 

Historically,  the  stimulus  that  at  length  pro- 
duced the  new  period  of  Greek  culture  was, 
perhaps,  the  Dorian  invasion.  The  Dorians, 
again,  were  a  northern  people,  and,  no  doubt, 
akin  in  language  and  religion  to  the  Achaeans 
of  the  earlier  inroad.  If  their  coming  was 
the  exciting  cause  of  the  new  civilisation,  it 
was  quite  normal  that  the  new  civilisation  in 
the  end  should  flourish  rather  in  a  people  in 
close  touch  with  the  descendants  of  the 
previous  Mycenaean -Achaeans,  who,  as  has 
been  said,  held  within  them  the  potentiality  of 
a  greater  intellectuality  through  the  former 
civilisation  of  their  ancestors. 


38  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

According  to  the  theory  outlined  in  the 
Introduction,  it  is  evident  that  we  must  presume 
that  there  was  some  considerable  break  in  the 
religious  history  of  the  inhabitants  of  Greece, 
that  one  form  of  religion  was  the  cause  of 
the  Mycenaean -Achaean  civilisation,  that  this 
gave  place  to  another  form  of  religious  belief 
which  produced  the  Athenian  civilisation — it 
may  be  called  Athenian  for  the  sake  of  con- 
venience, although,  of  course,  Athens  was  only 
the  leading  city  in  a  civilisation  that,  in  the 
end,  involved  the  whole  of  the  Greek  world. 

Now  we  cannot  say  roundly  that  the 
Athenian  religion  was  not  the  same  thing 
as  the  Homeric  religion ;  for  the  Homeric 
pantheon  very  largely  is  made  up  of  the  same 
deities  that  were  also  so  prominent  in  the  later 
historic  period  ;  Zeus  is  king  of  the  gods  in 
both,  Hera  is  his  wife,  and  so  on.  But  there 
are  points  of  difference,  points  of  distinction 
that  demand  our  close  attention.  Of  these 
the  most  remarkable  is  that  Dionysus  is  not 
a  prominent  figure  in  Homer,  whereas  he  is 
a  very  prominent  figure  indeed  in  the  historic 
pantheon,  and  actually  figures  more  conspicu- 
ously in  the  Athenian  religious  calendar  than 
Zeus,  or  Apollo,  or  even  Athena.  Demeter, 
again,  is  an  unimportant  character  in  Homer, 


ANCIENT   GREECE  36 

and,  primordial  though  she  seems,  her  per- 
sonality is  much  less  fully  developed  than  that 
of  other  goddesses  whose  names  are  so 
familiar.  Hermes,  also,  occupies  a  secondary 
position  in  Homer  ;  but  he  becomes  continually 
more  influential  towards  the  historic  period, 
until,  in  the  final  days  of  Greek  culture,  no 
deity  is  invoked  and  worshipped  more  con- 
stantly. Apollo  is  another  god  that  grew  in 
importance  in  the  interval  between  Homer  and 
the  fifth  century.  In  Homer  he  is  on  the 
Trojan  side,  and  only  becomes  truly  Hellenic 
at  a  comparatively  late  date.  On  the  other 
hand,  Hera  is  the  greatest  of  all  the  goddesses 
in  Homeric  times,  whipping  Artemis  with  her 
own  bowstring,  and  jeering  for  ever  at  Aphro- 
dite ;  but  in  the  fifth  century  the  worship  of 
Hera  by  no  means  is  very  conspicuous. 

Now  with  these  facts  in  our  heads  let  us 
look  once  again  at  the  course  of  Greek  civi- 
lisation, and  take  first  the  causes  of  the 
Mycenaean -Achaean  civilisation.  We  have  no 
contemporaneous  information  of  the  religious 
beliefs  that  may  have  produced  this  civilisa- 
tion :  we  can  ground  our  notions  only  upon 
the  Homeric  and  Hesiodic  poems,  that  were 
themselves  a  fruit  of  that  civilisation ;  and 
Homer  only  comes  to  us  in  the  form  in  which 


40  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

finally  he  was  put  together  at  Athens  in  the 
time  of  Pisistratus  (b.  528);  we  are  far  from 
having  any  guarantee  that  Homer,  as  we  read 
him,  is  literally  Homer  as  he  was  composed. 
In  poems  handed  down  by  word  of  mouth 
changes  are  made  easily  ;  and  such  changes 
as  brought  Homeric  theology  into  less  flagrant 
contradiction  with  the  current  theology  are  just 
the  changes  that  most  obviously  could  be 
made  before  the  time  of  the  final  Pisistratan 
edition.  Still,  we  have  no  choice  but  to  take 
the  Homeric  theology  of  the  Iliad  as  a  state- 
ment of  the  religious  beliefs  prevalent  in  the 
.Mycenaean-Achaean  civilisation . 

But  even  so  we  have  not  any  clear  notion 
of  the  religious  causes  that  may  have  produced 
that  civilisation  ;  for  the  beliefs  current  during 
the  height  of  that  civilisation,  as  we  see  them 
in  Homer,  may  have  varied  enormously  from 
their  primitive  significance,  all  the  more 
because  Greek  religion  throughout  is  a 
natural  religion— not  a  positive  religion  like 
Islam— and,  therefore,  is  particularly  apt  to 
vary.  Indeed,  the  Hellenic  pantheon  as  a 
whole  varies,  even  through  the  historic  period, 
in  a  constantly  quivering  kaleidoscopic  re- 
arrangement of  its  parts.  Thus  Zeus,  who,  in 
fact,  does  occupy  the  most  stable  position,  is 
worshipped  under  the  most  diverse  forms. 


ANCIENT   GREECE  41 

Homer  and  Hesiod,  according  to  the  well- 
known  passage  of  Herodotus  (bk.  ii.  c.  53), 
composed  the  Greek  pantheon  :  that  is  to  say, 
they  crystallised  the  religious  beliefs  current 
in  their  times.  At  a  quite  early  date  in  the 
Athenian  civilisation  Homer  became  the 
familiar  textbook  of  Greek  education ;  thus 
every  Greek  of  any  pretensions  to  education 
was  familiar  with  the  theology  to  be  found  in 
Homer— it  was  not  uncommon  for  a  well- 
educated  Athenian  to  be  able  to  repeat  by 
heart  the  whole  forty-eight  books  of  Homer. 
This  constant  study  of  Homer  must  have 
tended  to  prevent  the  religious  beliefs  of  the 
fifth  century  from  developing  into  a  condi- 
tion in  which  they  contradicted  the  Homeric 
canon  too  directly.  The  position  may  be 
stated  thus  :  Down  to  the  time  of  the  Pisis- 
tratan  edition  of  Homer — there  were  similarly 
composed  editions  in  many  other  cities  besides 
Athens— there  was  a  tendency,  on  the  one  hand, 
for  the  text  of  Homer  to  be  altered  into  agree- 
ment with  the  theology  of  the  fifth  century  ; 
on  the  other  hand,  after  the  Pisistratan  edition 
had  stereotyped  the  text,  there  was  a  tendency 
for  the  theology  of  the  fifth  century  not  to 
deviate  completely  from  the  Homeric  model. 
Thus  the  Homeric  theology,  as  we  may  study 


42  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

it  now,  is  perhaps  a  mean  between  the  lost 
Mycenaean -Achaean  faith  and  the  historic 
Athenian  faith.  It  is  in  this  way  that  explana- 
tion may  be  found  for  the  unexpected  fact 
that,  while  the  Homeric  religion  appears  super- 
ficially to  be  not  dissimilar  to  the  later  Hellenic 
religion,  the  resultant  civilisations  differ  so 
widely. 

And  yet,  as  we  observed  above,  there  are 
important  points  of  difference  between  the 
Homeric  pantheon  and  the  Athenian  pantheon. 
Dionysus  in  Homer  is  not  an  Olympian  deity 
at  all.  Homer  knows  merely  the  story  of 
Lycurgus  and  Dionysus  given  in  the  sixth  book 
of  the  Iliad.  Though  Dionysus  appears  in  an 
early  list  of  the  gods  (found  in  an  inscription 
at  Olympia),  for  the  ordinary  Athenian  he  was 
hardly  Olympian.  He  had  existed,  no  doubt, 
before  Homeric  times  as  a  local  god,  and 
seems  to  have  come  into  Greece  from  the 
north ;  for  in  Thrace,  under  the  title  of 
Sabazios,  he  had  been  "  from  early  times  the 
object  of  an  enthusiastic  cultus,  celebrated  with 
wild  orgies  and  excesses  of  every  kind." 

But,  besides  the  Thracian  Sabazios,  there  is 
a  second  southern  source,  from  which  the 
Greek  Dionysus  also  is  sprung,  in  the  Cretan 
Zagreus.  These  two  somewhat  diverse  divini- 


ANCIENT  GREECE  43 

ties  are  connected  with  each  other  as  vine- 
gods.  In  his  Cretan  aspect  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that  Dionysus  is  a  variant  of  the 
Egyptian  Osiris.  Now  through  Osiris 
Dionysus  is  a  deity  of  personal  immortality, 
and  in  this  he  is  quite  unlike  the  ordinary 
Olympian  deities,  who  were  most  mundane,  and 
gave  no  promise  of  life  after  death.  Dionysus, 
by  being  torn  to  pieces  in  Thrace  and  coming 
back  to  life,  does  hold  out  such  a  hope  to  his 
worshippers.  And  the  psychic  illusion  of 
immortality,  as  we  shall  see  later,  has  an 
important  civilising  purpose. 

Dionysus  appears  to  be  one  of  the  most 
important  civilising  factors  in  the  culture  of  the 
fifth  century.  There  is  a  tendency  for  us  to 
think  of  Dionysus  as  a  deteriorating  agent, 
unworthy  of  the  pure  aesthetic  appreciation 
that  is  so  characteristically  Greek,  as  though  he 
were  a  sort  of  excuse  for  excessive  drunkenness 
and  sottish  sensuality.  But  really  nothing 
could  be  much  farther  from  the  truth.  In  the 
first  place,  Greek  wine  was  not  strong  ;  also, 
it  was  diluted  almost  always  with  water  before 
being  drunk  ;  its  effect  was  not  to  make  men 
brutal  and  coarse  :  on  the  contrary,  "  it  cleared 
the  mind,  and  diminished  for  the  time  the 
presence  of  the  body."  Dionysus,  far  from 


U  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

being  the  god  of  heavy  debauchery,  was  one 
"  who  set  the  soul  free  from  the  prison  of  the 
flesh,"  to  use  the  expression  of  the  Dionysiac 
votaries.  (Gardner  and  Jevons:  Manual  of 
Greek  Antiquities,  book  iii.  chap,  iv.) 

It  was  the  influence  of  Zagreus-Osiris  that 
was  predominant  rather  than  that  of  the 
somewhat  beery  Sabazios. 

Thus  Dionysus  led  men  to  rise  above  the 
ordinary  worries  of  daily  life,  and  to  turn  from 
them  not  to  mere  revelry,  but  to  the  highest 
intellectual  pleasures  ;  for  it  is  to  the  Athenian 
Dionysia  that  we  trace  the  source  of  tragedy 
and  comedy,  and  an  Attic  tragedy  is  no  mere 
entertainment  to  pass  away  a  few  idle  hours  ; 
its  appreciation  demands  from  us — and  must 
have  demanded  from  its  first  hearers— a 
strenuous  intellectual  alertness.  Dionysus, 
apparently,  was  evolved  to  no  small  extent  in 
order  to  stimulate  the  intellectuality  of  those 
who  believed  in  him. 

We  can  see  that  it  was  desirable  that  psychic 
illusion  in  such  a  deity  should  stand,  for  the 
men  of  the  fifth  century,  to  some  extent  apart 
from  the  earlier  stereotyped  Homeric  pantheon, 
because  it  could  be  developed  thus  on  its  own 
special  lines  without  clashing  discordantly  with 
the  Homeric  mythology.  So  at  Athens  it  is 


ANCIENT   GREECE  45 

Dionysus,  rather  than  Apollo,  who  is  the  true 
culture-deity.  We  may  see  a  similar  purpose 
and  effect  of  the  Dionysiac  cult  in  the  fact  that 
it  was  Dionysus  who  inspired  such  symposia 
as  we  read  of  so  often  in  Athenian  literature. 
In  the  best  period  these  were  not  mere  drink- 
ing parties,  but  rather  gatherings  at  which 
subjects  of  the  highest  moral  and  philosophic 
interest  were  discussed. 

It  is  very  difficult  for  us  to  put  any  reality 
into  our  conception  of  Dionysus,  largely,  it 
seems,  because  our  thoughts  are  distorted  by 
perverse  Roman  notions  of  Bacchus.  We 
figure  to  ourselves,  perhaps,  some  corpulent 
and  very  human  old  fellow,  with  a  bottle  or 
a  wine-skin,  at  the  head  of  a  rout  of  drunken 
satyrs.  Such  a  conception  is  false  entirely  to 
the  civilising  Dionysiac  cult  of  the  fifth  century. 
Rather  he  is  "  a  young,  blooming,  and  aggres- 
sive deity,  everywhere  invading,  and  always  in 
the  end  triumphant "  (Gardner  and  Jevons, 
book  ii.  chap.  vi).  He  is  the  ever-youthful 
mentality  which  so  well  may  typify  all  that  is 
"  Greek  and  gracious."  He  is  the  young  intel- 
ligence that  leaps  from  hill  to  hill  over  the 
valleys  of  difficulty,  and  knows  by  intuition 
what  is  aesthetically  right. 

A  variation  of  the  Dionysiac  cult,  a  further 


46  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

aspect  of  it,  is  to  be  seen  in  Orphism.  In  this 
we  find  marks  of  a  belief  that  is  of  profound 
interest.  Orpheus  was  not  merely  a  great 
musician  of  Thrace  ;  to  the  Orphist  he  was 
much  more  :  he  was  the  man  who  had  gone 
down  alive  to  the  lower  world  of  shadows  to 
look  for  his  lost  Eurydice,  and  had  come  back 
again  to  teach  men  a  lesson  of  hope.  It  is 
this  return  of  Orpheus  from  Hades,  with  the 
trust  it  gave  of  a  similar  return  for  his 
followers,  that  made  Orphism  so  popular. 

It  is  of  great  interest  to  note  in  our  consider- 
ation of  the  Dionysiac  cult  that,  whereas  the 
old  Homeric  deities  are  all  local,  tribal,  all 
taking  sides  in  that  half -mythical  Trojan  war, 
Dionysus  is  not  tied  down  by  any  such  restric- 
tions. Dionysus  is  universal.  Any  person, 
male  or  female,  bond  or  free,  Athenian  or 
Spartan,  might  join  a  Dionysiac  tftWo?.  They 
had  only  to  pass  quite  a  simple  test,  that 
they  were  ayvoi,  euo-e/3ei9,  and  ayaBoi— if 
we  translate  the  words  we  may  connote  all 
sorts  of  implications  that  would  be  foreign  to 
Greek  thought.  It  is  said  that  the  "purity," 
"  piety,"  and  "  goodness  "  were  not  exactly  of 
a  moral  kind.  But  of  what  kind  were  they 
then?  It  seems  almost  perverse  to  say  that 
they  were  simply  ceremonial :  finally  the  words 


ANCIENT   GREECE  47 

became  so,  no  doubt,  but  originally  they  must 
have  had  surely  some  moral  significance— not 
necessarily  the  same  as  is  implied  in  our 
obvious  translations— so  that  the  Dionysiac 
psychic  illusion  must  have  tended  originally  to 
foster  some  particularity  of  moral — or  immoral, 
but  not  non-moral— sentiment.  The  nature  of 
that  particularity  we  are  not  able  to  define 
exactly,  but  its  existence  appears  indubitable. 

The  essential  purification  thus  connects  again 
the  Dionysiac  cult  with  the  Egyptian  Osiri- 
anism  and  "  the  ultimate  escape  from  evil  by 
renewed  purgation."  Such  a  notion  was  quite 
alien  to  the  Olympian  faith,  so  that  here  we 
see  that  Dionysus  brought  an  entirely  new 
principle  to  bear  upon  the  evolution  of  Greek 
civilisation,  a  conception  of  godhood  that  was 
unknown  to  Homer.  This  principle,  it  seems, 
was  strong  enough,  in  combination  with  the 
renewed,  revised  Olympian  faith,  to  produce  a 
civilisation  in  the  fifth  century  that  was  quite 
another  thing  from  the  Mycenaean -Achaean 
resultant  of  the  older  Homeric  faith. 

That  the  Dionysiac  cult  was  widespread 
throughout  the  Athenian  world  is  certain. 
Every  Athenian,  to  some  extent,  was  a  votary 
of  Dionysus  ;  for  the  Dionysiac  festivals,  along 
with  the  Greater  and  Lesser  Panathenaea,  and 


48  A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

the  Eleusinian  Mysteries,  were  the  most  impor- 
tant recurring  events  of  Attic  life.  Now  in 
several  respects  the  thiasi  were  precursors  of 
Christianity,  and  opened  the  door  by  which 
it  entered  (Gardner  and  Jevons,  book  iii. 
chap,  iv.),  for  they  were  universal  in  their 
scope,  and  in  no  way  peculiarly  Athenian  ;  and 
this  is  one  of  the  points  in  which  they  differ  so 
markedly  from  the  Athenaic  festivals,  whose 
special  function  it  was  to  encourage  Athenian 
patriotism. 

The  psychic  illusion  in  the  existence  of 
Athena  was  evolved  in  accordance  with  our 
theory  into  its  final  Athenian  prominence  more 
particularly  for  the  purpose  of  emphasising  the 
patriotic  sentiments  of  the  Athenians.  The 
goddess  Athena  became,  indeed,  the  "  mytho- 
logical embodiment"  of  the  city  of  Athens. 
The  culminating  point  of  the  Panathenaea  was 
the  procession  which  conveyed  the  Arrephoric 
robe  into  the  presence  of  the  archaic  wooden 
statue  of  the  goddess.  The  chief  point  to  be 
noticed  with  regard  to  this  ceremony  is  that  it 
fostered  the  illusion  that  the  city  in  some  pecu- 
liar way  was  the  object  of  a  divine  interest  and 
affection.  It  was  a  specially  local  illusion,  in 
which  the  outsider  had  no  lot  or  part.  We 
can  see  easily  enough  that  faith  in  the  pyschic 


ANCIENT  GREECE  49 

illusion  of  Athena,  the  divine  ally  and  pro- 
tectress, by  its  very  narrowness  and  concentra- 
tion, must  have  been  peculiarly  inspiring  to 
the  citizens  of  Athens,  have  led  them  to  act  in 
such  a  way  as  tended  to  the  glorification  of 
Athens.  The  glorification  of  Athens  was  an 
object  for  which  evolution  could  work,  exactly 
as,  in  the  biological  analogy,  it  works  for  the 
"  glorification  "  of  the  species  through  the 
advance  of  the  individual.  Ultimately  evolu- 
tion, both  politically  and  biologically,  may  be 
working  for  the  individual,  but  practically  it 
is  working  for  the  State  and  the  species.  And 
thus,  then,  we  see  that  evolution  would  foster 
in  the  individual  the  psychic  illusion  in  the 
reality  of  Athena,  because  that  illusion  tended 
to  the  advancement  of  Athens.  In  more 
general  terms  this  psychic  illusion  tended 
towards  the  increase  of  civilisation. 

The  scope  of  the  illusion  here  became,  in  the 
end,  remarkably  limited,  and  therefore  the 
explanation  seems  to  be  so  facile  that  at  first 
one  is  half  inclined  to  doubt  the  veracity  of  it. 
But  the  explanation  of  truth  is  apt  to  be  facile 
when  it  is  correct — one  notices  that  in  the 
greatest  triumphs  of  scientific  generalisation — 
and  therefore  may  be  correct  although  it  is 
facile. 

4 


50  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Looking  in  a  broader  spirit  at  the  Athenian 
civilisation,  we  can  see,  then,  two  great  factors 
at  work,  two  waves,  as  it  were,  of  civilising 
influence  generated  by  the  psychic  illusions  in 
the  divinity  of  Dionysus  and  in  the  divinity  of 
Athena  ;  the  former  is  a  universal  influence, 
the  latter  is  intensely  local.  When  the  Diony- 
siac  wave,  spreading  over  the  greater  part  of 
Greece,  crosses  the  path  of  the  narrow,  but 
lofty,  Athenaic  wave,  advancing  obliquely  on 
a  course  by  no  means  parallel  to  that  of  the 
Dionysiac  wave,  we  find  the  highest  level 
reached  by  civilisation  in  Greece,  at  Athens 
towards  the  end  of  the  fifth  century. 

The  Dionysiac  wave,  to  keep  the  same 
simile,  when  it  met  with  corresponding  local 
waves  elsewhere  than  in  Athens,  produced  cor- 
responding high  tides  of  civilisation — with  an 
Apolline  wave,  for  instance,  at  Sparta,  or  with 
an  Aphrodisiac  wave  at  Corinth. 

But  at  Athens  civilisation  was  a  fuller,  richer 
thing,  and  we  may  pick  out  one  other  illusion 
which  helped  to  produce  this  result,  the  illusion 
of  the  Eleusinian  Mysteries  ;  this  must  be  con- 
nected closely  with  the  Dionysiac  illusion. 
There  were  other  Mysteries  existing  in  various 
parts  of  Greece,  but  the  Mysteries  of  Eleusis, 
under  Athenian  influence,  developed  a  unique 


ANCIENT   GREECE  51 

importance,  an  importance  that  tended  to  in- 
crease peculiarly  the  Dionysiac  influence  at 
Athens.  Eleusis  became  "  the  great  strong- 
hold in  Hellas  of  the  doctrine  of  a  life  beyond 
the  grave"  (Gardner  and  Jevons,  book  iii. 
chap.  ix.).  There  can  be  little  doubt  that 
the  mysteries  originated  in  some  agricultural 
ceremonies  and  illusions  connected  with  the 
mysterious  growth  of  the  seed  after  it  is  sown. 
But  that  does  not  concern  us  very  greatly, 
except  in  so  far  as  it  reflects  the  illusion  of  the 
equivalence  of  the  resurrection  of  the  sown 
corn  in  the  new  plant  and  of  the  dead  human 
soul  in  a  future  life.  Now  it  would  be  in  full 
agreement  with  the  principle  of  our  theory  that 
great  stress  here  should  be  laid  upon  a  psychic 
illusion  in  immortality.  In  the  Phaedo  of 
Plato  (c.  69),  we  read  that  "  whosoever  goes 
uninitiated  to  Hades  will  lie  in  mud,  but  he  who 
has  been  purified  and  is  fully  initiate,  when  he 
comes  thither,  will  dwell  with  the  gods." 
And  again,  Miss  J.  E.  Harrison  in  her  most 
stimulating  "  Religion  of  Ancient  Greece," 
chap,  iii.,  feels  justified  in  declaring  that  "  the 
Mysteries  held  out  a  hope — and  herein  un- 
doubtedly lay  the  secret  of  their  extraordinary 
influence — of  help  and  guidance,  nay,  even  of 
certain  and  substantial  bliss  in  the  dim  shadow- 


52  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

land  that  lay  beyond  the  grave."  But  we 
ought  not  to  put  very  great  confidence  in 
arguments  founded  upon  what  ought  to  be  an 
intimate  knowledge  of  the  inner  workings  of 
the  Mysteries  when  we  do  not  possess  that 
intimate  knowledge.  They  may  have  been  a 
very  important  influence,  but  we  do  not  know 
for  certain  that  they  were  so. 

Really,  not  much  is  known  of  the  details  of 
me  mystic  initiation  :  perhaps  there  was  not 
much  to  know.  "  Aristotle,"  says  Synesius, 
14  is  of  opinion  that  the  initiated  learned  nothing 
precisely,  but  that  they  received  impressions, 
that  they  were  put  into  a  certain  frame  of 
mind  1  "  (quoted  by  Gardner  and  Jevons, 
book  iii.  chap.  ix.).  No  doubt  that  is  about 
the  truth  of  the  matter  :  it  is  safer  for  us  to 
leave  it  so.  There  were  certainly  dramatic 
representations,  concerned  especially  with  the 
grief  of  Demeter  at  the  abduction  of  Perse- 
phone and  the  subsequent  rejoicing  at  her 
resurrection  :  and  in  this  clearly  we  can  see 
the  teaching  of  a  psychic  illusion  in  the  immor- 
tality of  the  soul. 

Almost  every  Athenian,  we  may  be  sure,  was 
initiated  into  the  Mysteries— for  Socrates  was 
reproached  because  he  almost  alone  had  not 
tried  to  become  tuVrs.  But  what  from  our 


ANCIENT  GREECE  53 

point  of  view  is  missing  almost  entirely  in 
this  Eleusinian  illusion  is  the  motive  to  urge 
men  towards  conduct  that  would  differentiate 
them  from  other  people.  It  seems  that  only 
unimportant  ceremonial  regulations  were  con- 
sidered essential  for  the  admission  of  candi- 
dates, and  it  is  hardly  possible  to  trace  therein 
any  civilising  force.  Some  such  force  may 
have  existed,  and  be  unknown  to  us,  but,  on  the 
whole,  it  is  more  probable  that  it  did  not  exist 
at  all. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  another  most  distinctive 
feature  in  Hellenic  life,  the  public  games.  With 
our  remembrance  of  English  race-meetings  and 
cricket-matches  we  are  apt  to  look  upon  the 
Hellenic  games  in  the  wrong  spirit.  Primarily 
Hellenic  games  were  not  national  athletic 
sports,  but  rather  they  were  contests  held  in 
honour  of  various  gods.  It  is  in  this  light  that 
the  ordinary  Greek  must  have  regarded  them, 
at  any  rate  during  any  period  before  the  close 
of  the  fifth  century— that  is,  during  the  time 
that  Hellenic  civilisation  was  growing  to 
power. 

Their  origin,  beyond  doubt,  was  religious, 
and  we  are  justified  historically  in  saying  that 
any  civilising  effects  produced  by  the  games  are 
due  to  the  gods— especially  to  Zeus  and  Apollo 


54  A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

—in  whose  honour  the  games  were  held.  The 
Greeks  did  not  interrupt  their  national  business, 
even  their  wars,  in  order  to  run  races  ;  they 
did  it  in  order  to  honour  the  gods  in  the  way  in 
which  psychic  illusion  had  taught  them  that 
the  gods  desired  to  be  honoured. 

Can  we  see,  then,  why  this  unusual  illusion 
should  have  been  evolved,  why  the  Greeks 
should  have  honoured  their  gods  by  athletic 
contests?  To  us  Englishmen,  for  whom  some- 
what similar  contests  are  to-day  an  undoubted 
source  of  pleasure,  it  may  seem  unnecessary 
to  suppose  that  psychic  illusion  can  have  had 
anything  to  do  with  the  matter  :  but  it  seems 
that  we  would  be  wrong  in  presuming  that  a 
sense  of  pleasurable  excitement,  in  itself,  could 
have  produced  in  Greece  the  very  extraordinary 
national  enthusiasm  about  the  public  games, 
especially  if  we  remember  that  Greece  was 
not  a  united  country,  like  England,  but  a  group 
of  jealous  and  often  hostile  States,  over  all  of 
whom  the  enthusiasm  extended  with  remark- 
able vigour.  The  reason  was  deeper.  The 
games  rose  to  their  peculiar  prominence  in 
Hellenic  life  because  they  fostered  in  each 
State  the  desire  for  that  physical  fitness  which 
man  is  so  apt  to  lose  in  cities,  but  which  is  so 
eminently  desirable  in  the  citizen-soldiers  of  a 


ANCIENT  GREECE  55 

community  that  is  often  at  war  with  neigh- 
bouring communities. 

The  prominence  of  the  various  games,  it  is 
suggested,  was  a  leading  feature  in  the  move- 
ment which  raised  Greece  far  above  the 
neighbouring  barbarian  countries,  because  the 
internecine  feuds  of  Greece  had  made  the 
Greek  the  best  fighter  of  his  time,  and  it  was 
the  games  that  led  to  the  establishment  in  each 
Greek  State  of  the  racial  stock  which  could  be 
victorious  in  their  internecine  strife.  There  is 
no  rational  justification  for  supposing  that  the 
Greeks  held  public  games  merely  because  they 
enjoyed  them.  Such  a  supposition  appears  to 
be  unscientific,  because  it  is  supported  by  no 
earlier  analogies  at  all,  and  only  by  a  few  weak 
analogies  in  the  later  history  of  mankind. 
Surely  it  is  a  more  rational  hypothesis  to  say 
that  the  games  were  evolved  in  order  to 
improve  the  fighting  power  of  the  members 
of  rival  communities. 

If  we  accept  that  suggestion,  we  can  see 
that  the  problem  which  had  to  be  evolved  was 
the  establishment  of  the  fixed  and  final  sanc- 
tion of  the  holding  of  public  games.  This 
sanction  evolution  was  able  to  ratify  through 
the  psychic  illusion  that  the  gods — the  belief 
in  whose  existence  was  established  already  by 


56  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

other  forms  of  psychic  illusion — took  honour 
and  delight  from  the  athletic  contests.  The 
games,  then,  would  tend  towards  the  physical 
superiority  of  the  various  Greek  communities, 
and  so  would  tend  only  secondarily  towards  a 
higher  state  of  civilisation.  That  condition, 
however,  would  tend  to  be  produced  by  the 
material  security  which  the  games  were  in- 
clined to  secure :  for  we  know  historically 
that  material  security  leads  to  an  increase  of 
civilisation,  because  the  population  then  is 
inclined  to  grow  towards  the  maximum  that  the 
available  food-supply  can  support.  There  will 
be  thus  a  keen  rivalry  within  the  community  to 
secure  the  better  positions,  and  these  inevitably 
will  fall  to  the  higher  intelligences  in  the  long 
run  :  the  rivalry  will  be  keener  than  it  would 
be  where  material  insecurity  was  keeping  the 
population  sparse  and  scattered. 

The  argument  leads  us  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  public  games  of  Greece  were  a  cause  of 
increased  intelligence,  and  so  were  a  civilising 
factor.  Thus  the  games  promoted  an  increase 
of  civilisation  in  two  ways,  which  correspond 
to  the  two  factors  that  we  noticed  above  at 
Athens,  and  spoke  of  as  the  Athenaic  wave 
and  the  Dionysiac  wave ;  for  the  games  led 
both  to  the  glorification  of  each  State— though 


ANCIENT  GREECE  57 

not  of  Athens  more  than  of  other  States  in 
Greece— and  also,  secondarily,  to  the  advance- 
ment of  intellectuality. 

We  may  sum  up  this  brief  sketch  of  the 
suggested  causes  of  Greek  civilisation  in  the 
following  way. 

Any  civilisation  which,  at  some  very  early 
date,  may  have  been  evolved  amongst  the 
primitive  "  Mediterranean/'  or  Pelasgian,  people 
on  the  northern  coasts  of  the  Aegean  Sea  can- 
not be  called  in  any  sense  historic.  But  after 
the  Achaean  invaders  had  descended  from  the 
north,  and  coalesced  with  a  group  of  these 
Pelasgians,  the  Olympian  religion  professed  by 
this  combination  produced  the  Mycenaean- 
Achaean  civilisation,  of  which  Homer — as  we 
read  him  to-day — gives  us  a  graphic,  but  prob- 
ably unhistorical,  picture.  This  represents  the 
highest  civilisation  that  the  pure  Olympian 
religion  produced.  The  northern  element  in 
this  civilisation  is  very  strong.  "  The  gods  of 
Homer,"  says  Miss  Harrison  (Religion  oj 
Ancient  Greece,  chap,  ii.),  "are  not  Greek 
in  the  classical  sense  ;  they  are  Teutonic  and 
Norse."  The  Homeric  Zeus,  with  his 
boisterous  pranks  and  "  Berserker  "  passions, 
above  all  things  is  not  Hellenic  in  the  conno- 
tation that  usually  we  give  to  the  term. 


58  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

When  this  early  civilisation  sank  into  decay, 
new  tribes,  closely  akin  to  the  Achaeans, 
entered  Greece  from  the  north,  the  last  to 
arrive  being  the  Dorians.  Amongst  these  new 
peoples  the  old  Olympian  religion  in  itself 
might  have  produced  some  civilisation,  especi- 
ally since  it  would  have  been  able  to  work 
upon  the  potentialities  implanted  by  the 
Mycenaean -Achaean  civilisation.  But  there 
would  have  been  some  difficulty  in  keeping 
clear  of  the  infectious  disillusion  which,  no 
doubt,  marked  and  caused  the  decadence  of 
Homeric  Olympianism— disillusion  is  to  be 
observed  even  in  Homer  ;  he  "  does  not  take 
his  gods  very  seriously."  To  avoid  this  danger 
it  was  desirable  that  some  new  diverse  influ- 
ences should  be  introduced.  By  far  the  most 
important  of  these  influences  was  found  in 
Dionysus. 

Dionysus  came  to  Greece  ultimately  from 
Egypt,  where,  as  Osiris,  he  was  the  most 
important  deity  of  the  psychic  illusion  of  im- 
mortality. Osiris  passed  from  the  banks  of 
the  Nile  to  Crete— Ra  of  Amenti  made  the 
same  passage  and  became  the  Cretan  Rha- 
damanthus  ( Religion  of  Ancient  Greece, 
chap,  iii.)— where  he  seems  to  have  coalesced 
with  a  native  deity  of  unknown  origin,  and 


ANCIENT  GREECE  59 

became  known  as  Zagreus.  From  Crete 
Osiris-Zagreus  passed  into  Asia  Minor,  and 
became  Dionysus.  He  did  not  advance  into 
Greece  across  the  Aegean  islands,  but 
apparently  by  a  northern  route  through  Thrace. 
There  he  took  to  himself  Sabazios — who  pos- 
sibly may  have  sprung  originally  from  an 
Egyptian  source  also — and  from  this  coales- 
cence, no  doubt,  were  born  those  unseemly 
characteristics  which  seem  so  inconsistent  with 
the  pure  Dionysiac  Osirianism,  but  which  may 
have  been  necessary  to  insure  the  popularity  of 
the  cult.  From  the  combination  of  the  worship 
of  Dionysus  with  the  revised  and  intensely 
localised  Olympian  psychic  illusions  already 
predominant  in  Hellas  sprang  the  Greek 
civilisation  of  the  fifth  century. 


CHAPTER    II 
EARLY  ROMAN  CIVILISATION 

THE  beginnings  of  the  Roman  religion  are  lost 
in  the  mists  of  a  legendary  antiquity.  Indeed, 
original  vagueness  is  part  of  the  essential 
nature  of  religion.  Without  irrational  legends 
the  faith  of  the  believer  cannot  exist  as  a 
psychic  illusion.  It  is  just  this  belief  in  the 
incredible,  this  spiritual  sanction  of  the 
irrational,  that  enables  a  religion  to  raise  its 
faithful  sons  to  a  higher  condition  of  conduct 
and  thought  than  that  of  the  neighbouring 
unbelievers. 

It  is,  therefore,  only  in  the  comparatively 
cultured  writers  of  a  later  period  that  we  find 
an  account  of  the  primitive  faiths  of  Rome. 
This  makes  it  difficult  for  us  to  see  clearly 
what  it  was  in  the  doctrines  and  faith  of  the 
early  Romans  that  made  their  religion  superior 
to  that  of  the  other  inhabitants  of  Europe — 
excepting  the  Greeks. 


EARLY  ROMAN   CIVILISATION  61 

And  we  are  unable  to  contrast  this  early 
Roman  faith  with  the  contemporaneous  beliefs 
of  the  barbarians,  for  we  are  even  more 
ignorant  of  the  esoteric  principles  of  the  bar- 
barian religions  of  Europe.  We  have,  then, 
to  be  content  to  form  theories  on  the  unsatis- 
factory basis  of  sophisticated  later  accounts. 

We  note,  however,  that  the  earliest  Roman 
theology  consists  to  a  remarkable  extent  of 
the  personification  of  conceptions  and  abstrac- 
tions. Such  words  as  Saeturnus,  Ops,  Bellona, 
Terminus,  Fides,  Concordia  occur  as  names  of 
the  earliest  personal  deities  ;  and  philologic- 
ally  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  they  are 
personal  conceptions  figuring  general  actions 
of  social  importance.  Saeturnus  (sowing)  and 
Ops  (agricultural  labour),  for  instance,  deal 
with  matters  of  consummate  value  to  the  con- 
sistent continuance  of  a  primitive  community  ; 
for  without  them  the  community  is  exposed 
more  severely  to  the  effects  of  the  vagaries 
of  weather.  The  evolution  of  a  psychic 
illusion,  which  influenced  the  individual 
members  of  a  community  to  sow  and  labour 
in  the  field  with  consistent  forethought,  was, 
therefore,  of  deep  importance  to  the  con- 
tinuance of  the  community.  Without  the 
illusion  the  individual  would  be  content  with 


62          A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

such  toil  that  he  might  be  secure  personally 
in  matters  of  food  supply  for  a  comparatively 
brief  time  ahead.  The  illusion  of  spiritual 
service  would  influence  him  constantly  towards 
that  laborious  perseverance  which  alone  would 
guarantee  the  future  food  supply  of  himself 
and  of  the  community  of  which  he  was  a 
member.  The  psychic  side  of  the  stimulus 
alone  could  overcome  the  physical  selfishness 
of  the  individual,  the  physical  distaste  for 
labour.  If  we  put  clearly  before  us  these  two 
factors,  the  natural  love  of  ease  which  is  in- 
herent in  our  animal  nature  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  need  of  constant  provisional  labour  to 
guarantee  the  continuance  of  a  superior  con- 
dition of  affairs  on  the  other,  we  can  see  that 
a  motive  to  overcome  natural  laziness  and  to 
secure  perseverance  in  labour  would  be  the 
objective  for  which  the  evolution  of  a  superior 
community  may  be  said  necessarily  to  be 
aiming.  And  this  object  could  be  reached 
by  the  evolution  of  a  psychic  illusion  in  the 
members  of  the  community,  which  would  sub- 
ordinate in  their  minds  the  pleasures  of  the 
present  to  the  labours  for  the  future. 

Saeturnus  and  Ops  thus  assured  the  food 
supply  of  the  members  of  the  community.  It 
was  further  necessary  that  the  community 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  63 

should  be  secured  against  the  attacks  of 
neighbours  who  envied  the  advantages  that 
Saeturnus  and  Ops  conferred  upon  their 
believers.  Therefore  we  find  a  primitive  faith 
in  Bellona,  the  personification  of  the  fighting 
spirit  of  the  community.  The  individual  who 
was  to  survive  in  the  struggle  of  life  was,  of 
course,  through  simple  biological  evolution, 
ready  to  risk  his  life  in  order  to  obtain  food, 
shelter,  and  the  mate  that  was  essential  to  the 
continuance  of  the  species  ;  but  this  is  insuffi- 
cient to  urge  the  individual  to  risk  his  life 
for  the  ulterior  advancement  of  the  community. 
For  this  a  psychic  illusion  was  necessary. 

Amongst  the  Romans  this  illusion  was 
evolved  as  a  faith  in  Bellona  and  Mars. 
The  form  of  this  faith  is  entirely  unimportant 
from  an  evolutionary  standpoint,  and  even  as 
a  matter  of  interest  for  us  it  is  subsidiary  ; 
the  all -important  point  with  regard  to  the  belief 
is  that  men  having  the  faith  were  led  thereby 
to  fight,  not  from  motives  of  selfishness  but 
in  accordance  with  the  future  interests  of  the 
community. 

In  saying  this  we  do  not  call  into  being  a 
fantastic  sort  of  personification  of  a  spiritual 
guide  for  the  principles  of  evolution ;  it  is 
merely  the  simple  statement  that  in  the  in- 


64  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

numerable  possible  variations  of  conduct  the 
succeeding  and  surviving  variation  was  that 
which  induced  men  to  act  and  fight  to  the 
advancement  of  the  community ;  for  this  a 
faith  in  the  reality  of  Bellona  was  the  necessary 
psychic  illusion. 

It  is  only  by  such  a  faith  that  heroic  self- 
sacrifice  can  be  explained.  When  Decius  Mus 
sacrificed  his  life  for  Rome  in  B.C.  340,  and 
when  his  son,  following  his  example,  did  the 
same  at  Sentinum  in  B.C.  295,  they  were  acting 
under  the  influence  of  a  psychic  illusion.  Their 
self-sacrifice  was  of  no  personal  advantage  to 
them,  but  it  was  of  advantage  to  the  com- 
munity. The  psychic  illusion  which  inspired 
it  had  been  evolved  as  a  desirable  principle 
in  the  consummation  of  Roman  hegemony. 
The  cases  of  the  Decii  are  given  as  examples 
of  the  action  and  reaction  of  irrational  motives 
on  Roman  conduct. 

Care  must  be  taken  in  praising  or  blaming 
such  heroic  self-sacrifices  to  remember  that  our 
ideas  of  goodness  and  badness  are  themselves 
evolved  ideas.  We  estimate  their  value  being 
ourselves  under  the  influence  of  a  similar  group 
of  psychic  ideas,  evolved  in  a  similar  manner  ; 
while  admitting  that  the  action  of  the  Decii 
was  good,  we  must  not  forget  that  goodness 


EARLY  ROMAN   CIVILISATION  65 

is  not  a  thing  per  se,  but  is  rather  the  con- 
ception of  that  which  evolution  has  elected  as 
the  desirable  conduct  of  the  individuals  in  a 
community. 

Turning  from  the  Bellonic  virtues,  we  notice 
amongst  the  early  deities  of  Rome  the  com- 
munal self-seeking  abstractions  Terminus, 
Fides,  and  Concordia.  These  three  psychic 
illusions  may  be  grouped  together  conveniently, 
because  they  all  deal  with  the  mutual  relations 
of  the  members  of  the  community.  The  reason 
why  these  three  deities  were  evolved  to  take 
a  prominent  position  in  the  early  Roman 
hierarchy  was  that  the  virtues  which  they 
personified  were  found  to  be  essential  to  the 
advancement  of  the  community.  This  state- 
ment undoubtedly  to  a  considerable  extent  begs 
the  question  ;  indeed,  the  petitio  principii  is 
an  essential  part  of  the  rational  exegesis  of 
the  irrational. 

Terminus,  the  divine  sanction  of  landed 
property,  shows  by  his  very  existence  the  inti- 
mate importance  to  the  community  in  early 
days  of  the  continuance  of  territorial  rights 
and  restrictions.  It  is  difficult,  perhaps,  for 
us  to  grasp  the  importance  of  this  psychic 
illusion  ;  but  in  it  there  may  be  seen  the  prin- 
ciple of  the  restriction  of  growth  in  the  size 

5 


66  A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

both  of  personal  and  of  communal  territorial 
property,  and  this  might  be  of  importance  in 
limiting  the  hereditary  number  of  suitable  men 
of  prominence  which  it  was  the  business  of 
evolution  (if  the  expression  may  be  used)  to 
place  in  control  of  the  community.  Terminus, 
also,  by  giving  a  psychic  illusion  to  the 
religious  sanctity  of  boundaries,  would  tend  to 
produce  notions  of  common  honesty  in  the 
mutual  relations  of  the  members  of  the  com- 
munity ;  and  such  honesty  would  increase  the 
co-operative  efficiency  of  the  community. 

On  this  score  Terminus  approaches  closely 
to  the  illusions  of  Fides  and  Concordia.  We 
have  some  difficulty  in  realising  the  personali- 
ties of  Fides  and  Concordia,  because,  to  us, 
faith  and  concord  are  commonplace  imper- 
sonal abstractions.  But  to  the  early  Romans 
each  of  them  was  a  personality.  Camillus 
built  the  well-known  temple  of  Concordia  in 
367  B.C.  Ennius  (239-169  B.C.),  quoted  by 
Cicero  (Opp  3,  29,  104),  uses  the  word 
"  Fides  "  with  an  indubitable  sense  of  personi- 
fication ;  and  similar  archaistic  references 
might  be  given  in  large  numbers  to  the 
writing  of  Vergil  and  Horace. 

It  seems  that  the  illusions  of  the  personality 
of  Fides  and  Concordia  were  of  value  in  the 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  67 

evolution  of  the  Roman  State,  because  it  was 
this  personification  of  abstractions  that  gave 
the  necessary  irrational  impulse  towards  action 
in  accordance  with  the  principles  of  faith  and 
concord  ;  and  faith  and  concord,  in  the  internal 
relations  of  the  community,  enabled  its  mem- 
bers to  compose  its  communal  economy  in 
harmony  with  the  object  for  which  evolution 
may  be  said  to  have  been  striving. 

These  six  deities,  besides  inculcating  their 
individual  virtues,  acted  together  in  promoting 
intelligence,  because  the  psychic  illusion  of 
their  personalities,  however  illusory,  was  yet 
psychic.  It  is  the  psychic  rather  than  the 
illusory  side  that  here  becomes  of  importance  ; 
for  a  psychic  conception  is  essentially  intellec- 
tual. If  the  worship  of  the  personal  deities 
who  personified  the  typical  virtues  of  the  primi- 
tive Roman  led  to  an  increased  intellectual 
power,  we  can  see  how  important  from  an 
evolutionary  point  of  view  such  worship  would 
be  ;  in  fact,  the  insistence  upon  the  personal 
entity  of  the  abstractions  underlying  the  virtues 
would  be  the  immediate  object  of  that  evolu- 
tionary selection  whose  ultimate  aim  we  may 
take  to  be  the  political  supremacy  of  the  Roman 
community. 

So  far  no  mention  has  been  made  of  Jupiter, 


68  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

the  deity  to  whom  we  are  apt  to  look  as 
the  supreme  god  of  the  Roman  hierarchy. 
Although  the  worship  of  Jupiter  is  undoubtedly 
of  great  antiquity  in  the  Roman  religion,  it 
would  seem  that  at  first  he  did  not  occupy 
that  position  of  dominant  importance  which 
afterwards  he  held  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Augustan  age.  He  was,  perhaps,  the  titular 
father  of  gods  and  men  at  the  earliest  date 
at  which  we  hear  of  him,  but  titular  supre- 
macy does  not  necessarily  imply  supreme 
practical  influence. 

The  importance  of  Jupiter,  indeed,  increased 
under  Hellenic  influence.  The  Roman  colony 
of  Achaea  was  formed  in  146  B.C.,  after  the 
taking  of  Corinth  by  Mummius,  and  this  date 
conveniently  marks  a  large  increase  of  Hellenic 
influence  upon  Roman  ideas.  But  the  same 
Hellenic  influence  had  been  then  long  acting 
upon  Rome,  although  in  a  more  subtle  way. 
Rome  was  not  in  a  highly  civilised  condition 
in  146  B.C.— Ennius,  that  quite  archaic  poet, 
died  in  169  B.C.  Roman  religion  was  still 
in  a  state  of  flux.  At  whatever  anterior  date 
we  may  place  the  commencement  of  direct 
Hellenic  influence— the  Greek  colonies  in 
Southern  Italy  were  really  primordial  in 
comparison  with  Roman  civilisation — at  that 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  69 

date  may  be  placed  the  real  beginning  of 
Jovian  power. 

It  was,  however,  in  the  last  century  and  a 
half  before  Christ  that  Jupiter  came  to  exer- 
cise any  influence  comparable  with  his  titular 
position.  This  he  did  by  leading  men  towards 
a  monotheistic  theory  of  divinity  that  did  not 
clash  hopelessly  with  the  philosophy  that  Rome 
so  greedily  swallowed  at  the  hands  of  Greece. 

The  Roman  hierarchy,  with  which  we  are 
all  roughly  familiar,  was  not  the  natural  de- 
scendant of  the  primitive  Roman  religion  ;  it 
was  rather  a  son  by  adoption,  and  came  into 
prominence  as  the  imitation  of  Hellenic  models. 
It  would  be  interesting  to  know  what  form 
the  Roman  religion  would  have  assumed  if 
it  had  not  come  under  the  influence  of  the 
more  sophisticated  Hellenic  civilisation ;  but 
historically  the  influence  of  Greece  was  pre- 
potent in  the  evolution  of  Roman  culture,  as  a 
decadent  civilisation  always  is  prepotent  in 
settling  the  form  of  the  offspring  of  super- 
imposed immature  civilisation. 

It  seems  probable  that  the  influence  of 
Hellenic  culture  upon  the  Roman  religion  made 
possible  the  ultimate  aggrandisement  of  Roman 
civilisation  ;  the  less  sophisticated  intellect  of 
Rome  was  able  to  receive  in  the  Hellenic 


70  A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

deities  that  psychic  illusion  which  Greece  had 
outgrown . 

In  the  new  and  closely  related  illusions 
which  Rome  thus  received  from  Greece,  Rome 
found  a  new  psychic  source  of  life  which 
enabled  her  to  gain  the  hegemony  of  European 
civilisation.  The  fact  that  Romans  and  Greeks 
were  connected  phylogenetically  made  it  a 
simple  matter  for  Rome  to  accept  the  out- 
worn psychic  illusions  of  Greece;  :  that  was  a 
mere  question  of  nomenclature.  Roman 
thought  was  young  enough  to  rejuvenate 
the  senility  of  Hellenic  religion. 

Let  us  apply  this  to  the  particular  cases 
of  a  few  leading  deities.  Reference  already 
has  been  made  to  Zeus  and  Jupiter.  The 
Roman  Mercurius  was  identified  with  the 
Greek  Hermes,  but  Mercurius  was  philologic- 
ally  the  personified  abstraction  of  commerce 
a  mercibus  est  dictus  (Paul  ex  Fest.,  p.  124, 
Miill.).  As  such  his  position  is  akin  entirely 
to  that  of  the  other  early  Roman  personified 
abstractions,  Terminus,  Fides,  and  the  rest.  A 
temple  was  built  to  his  honour  as  early  as 
495  B-c-  near  the  Circus  Maximus.  It  is  only 
under  Hellenic  influence  that  he  gains  the 
attributes  which  we  associate  usually  with  his 
name  ;  and  this  increased  the  definiteness  of 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  71 

his  personality,  which  seems  formerly  to  have 
been  far  from  clear  ;  this  increased  definition 
led,  in  minds  unsophisticated  by  Hellenic 
casuistry,  to  a  rejuvenation  of  the  psychic 
illusion  in  his  Olympian  existence.  The 
Hellenic  Hermes  was  not  a  trade -deity,  but 
a  speech -deity  ;  even  to  the  ancients  his  identi- 
fication with  Mercury  was  apparently  rather 
difficult ;  but  the  difficulty  was  overcome, 
because  a  renewal  of  the  psychic  illusion  of  the 
personality  of  Mercury  was  desirable  for  the 
evolution  of  the  advancement  of  Rome. 

The  case  of  Aphrodite  and  Venus,  from  our 
point  of  view,  is  less  important.  The  work 
which  Venus  personifies  is  bound  up  so  inti- 
mately by  Nature  with  the  continuance  of  the 
species  that  a  psychic  illusion  in  her  personality 
seems  unnecessary.  So  the  early  Roman 
religion  looked  upon  her  as  one  of  the  least 
important  divinities.  After  her  identification 
with  Aphrodite  she  became  more  prominent. 
Probably  this  is  only  an  example  of  analogous 
variation.  A  sort  of  speculative  hedonism 
would  tend,  also,  to  accentuate  her  personality. 

Mommsen  (book  i.  chap,  xii.)  speaks  of 
Mars  as  the  oldest  and  most  national  form  of 
divinity  in  Italy.  Perhaps  it  would  have  been 
safer  to  say,  instead  of  "  oldest,"  that  he  was 


72          A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

as  old  as  any  known  form  of  divinity.  The 
lust  of  fighting  was  entirely  necessary  in  a 
community  that  was  to  get  the  better  of  its 
neighbours,  so  that  we  may  feel  sure  that  a 
psychic  illusion  personifying  the  abstraction  of 
fighting  would  be  evolved  at  an  early  period. 
A  collateral  reduplicated  form  of  the  name 
"  Mars "  occurs  in  the  song  of  the  Arval 
brothers,  and  an  equivalent  nomenclature  is 
to  be  found  in  the  Sabine  and  Oscan  Mamers. 
He  was  a  truly  Italian  deity  whose  personality 
was  largely  fixed  apart  from  the  influence  of 
the  Hellenic  Ares,  who,  indeed,  while  no  doubt 
increasing  the  pyschic  illusion  of  his  per- 
sonality, would  seem  to  have  detracted,  at  any 
rate  in  our  estimation,  from  the  dignity  of  his 
character. 

Under  the  title  of  Quirinus,  however,  he 
would  gain  evolutionary  importance,  from  a 
purely  Italian  source,  as  personifying  the 
patriotism  of  the  Romans ;  the  increase  of 
the  power  of  the  psychic  illusion  which  came  to 
him  as  to  the  other  gods  under  Hellenic  influ- 
ence would  compensate  from  the  evolutionary 
point  of  view  for  the  influx  of  discreditable 
stories  associated  with  his  later  worship. 

Apollo  was  Hellenic,  not  Roman.  The  mere 
name  shows  this  philologically,  apart  from  his- 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  73 

torical  statements,  for  the  early  Roman  form 
of  the  name  was  "  Aperta,  the  opener,  an 
etymological  perversion  of  the  Doric  Apellon, 
the  antiquity  of  which  is  betrayed  by  its  very 
barbarism,"  as  Mommsen  justly  remarks. 

It  is  interesting,  to  observe  that  the  god  of 
art  was  absent  entirely  from  the  primitive 
Roman  theology  ;  while  Rome  evolved  for  her- 
self the  illusions  of  the  personality  of  such 
abstractions  as  typified  the  virtues  necessary 
for  the  promotion  of  her  political  ascendancy, 
evolution,  working  for  this  end,  had  no  special 
need  of  a  psychic  illusion  that  dealt  with  the 
artistic  side  of  man's  nature  ;  indeed,  we  can 
see  that  economically  Rome  perhaps  gained 
rather  than  lost,  in  the  earliest  times,  by  the 
omission  to  add  the  evolution  of  an  Apolline 
personality  to  that  of  her  already  sufficiently 
numerous  group  of  personified  abstractions. 

However,  at  a  very  early  date,  under 
Hellenic  influence,  the  worship  of  Apollo 
established  itself  in  Rome,  no  doubt  because 
the  intellectual  value  of  Apolline  worship  was 
great  :  such  assistance  would  be  taken  up 
greedily  by  that  evolutionary  process  which 
was  leading  Rome  up  the  path  to  civilisation  ; 
but  we  can  see  easily  that  it  would  be  taken 
up  only  after  the  earlier  deities  had  estab- 


74  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

lished  Rome  firmly  upon  the  path  of  progress. 
It  is  generally  recognised  that  Roman  art  was 
always  a  parasitic  growth,  which  betrayed  at 
every  moment  its  dependence  upon  Hellenic 
culture. 

It  seems,  indeed,  that  we  cannot  lay  too 
much  emphasis  upon  the  necessity  of  the 
personification  in  the  divinities  of  the  abstract 
virtues  which  made  ancient  Rome  the  mistress 
of  Europe.  For  there  were  two  necessary 
factors  in  the  situation  :  (  i )  that  Rome  should 
possess  the  practice  of  those  abstract  virtues 
which  could  lead  her  to  predominance  ;  ( 2 ) 
that  these  abstractions  should  have  individual 
personalities  to  give  the  psychic  illusion,  the 
religious  sanction,  which  alone  could  enable 
Romans  to  persevere  in  the  practice  of  them 
where  they  were  opposed  to  rational  selfishness. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  assume  that  Rome 
possessed  any  innate  superiority  to  the  innu- 
merable communities  of  Europe  outside  the 
Hellenic  empires.  What,  then,  was  it  that  led 
Rome  to  predominance  in  Latium,  in  Italy, 
in  the  Mediterranean  orbis  terrarum  ?  The  city 
of  Rome,  in  spite  of  the  seven  hills,  was  not 
situated  in  a  position  of  commanding  strength. 
We  know  that  the  peninsula  contains  numerous 
sites  of  greater  natural  strength,  sites  which 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  75 

other  cities  used  to  their  advantage  in  later 
ages— Canossa,  for  instance,  with  its  almost  im- 
pregnable rock,  or  Orvieto.  And  outside  Italy, 
of  course,  examples  are  endless. 

It  is.  true  that  Rome  had  the  advantage  of 
being  near  the  commercial  possibilities  of  the 
sea,  with  her  convenient  access  to  the  Mediter- 
ranean in  the  navigable  Tiber  ;  but  Ostia  has 
never  been  the  leading  port  of  Italy.  Other 
ports  have  risen  to  greater  naval  importance, 
Venice,  Ravenna,  Genoa. 

It  was  rather  in  the  brains  of  her  people 
that  the  germs  of  Roman  greatness  must  be 
sought.  There  were  other  communities  of 
Oscan  and  Sabine  stock  whose  intellectual 
capacities  were  not  inferior  to  those  of  Rome. 
How  few  of  the  great  names  who  represent 
Roman  intelligence  are  purely  Roman  in 
origin  !  Vergil  came  from  Andes,  near 
Mantua ;  Horace  was  Apulian ;  Cicero  was 
born  at  Arpinum ;  Livy  at  Padua ;  Tacitus 
was,  at  any  rate,  not  Roman.  Other  places 
than  Rome  undoubtedly  possessed  the  poten- 
tiality of  equal  intelligence. 

There  must,  then,  have  been  some  point,  or 
some  concatenation  of  points,  which  enabled 
the  early  Roman  to  reach  a  higher  plane  than 
his  neighbours.  What  this  was  we  can  only 


76  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

hope  to  perceive  ex  post  facto,  for  the 
beginnings  of  history  lose  themselves  in  the 
mists  of  antiquity.  It  is  suggested  here  that 
the  distinguishing  feature  is  to  be  found  in 
the  religion  of  Rome.  Rome  possessed  at  an 
early  period  that  group  of  personified  abstrac- 
tions which  embodied  the  virtues  necessary  for 
her  advancement.  Why  these  abstractions 
were  especially  predominant  in  Rome  we  are 
unable  to  say.  We  have  to  be  content  to 
accept  the  fact  just  as  we  have  to  accept  the 
fact  that  a  certain  variation  in  an  individual 
animal  has  induced  its  descendants  eventually 
to  occupy  a  new  specific  position.  We  cannot 
explain  the  cause  of  the  particular  variation. 
Out  of  countless  variations  the  spirit  of  evolu- 
tion, so  to  speak,  selects  the  desirable  varia- 
tion, and  through  it  produces  the  predominant 
species.  Similarly  the  spirit  of  evolution,  out 
of  the  many  intellectual  variations  in  otherwise 
suitable  communities  of  Italy,  selected  the  con- 
catenation of  desirabilities  which  existed  in 
Rome,  and  from  it  produced  the  predominance 
of  Rome. 

We  can  see  dimly  that  the  physical  con- 
ditions of  Rome  with  its  seven  hills  and  its 
river  were  not  unfavourable.  We  can  see  that 
Rome  lay  beyond,  but  in  close  proximity  to, 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION          77 

the  Italian  limit  of  Hellenic  political  in- 
fluence. 

In  Rome  were  evolved  the  psychic  illusions 
of  the  personality  of  the  deities  personifying 
numerous  useful  virtues.  We  may  suppose 
that,  if  the  subsequent  course  of  evolution  had 
been  clear  of  outside  influence,  the  normal 
disillusion  and  disbelief  would  have  followed 
the  increased  intellectual  and  efficient  power  ; 
but  Hellenic  culture  intervened  at  the  necessary 
stage  in  the  history  of  Roman  development. 
The  close  kinship  of  the  Roman  and  Hellenic 
stocks  made  this  intervention  much  simpler 
than  would  have  been  the  case  if  the  two  stocks 
had  been  racially  diverse. 

The  result  was  that  Rome  accepted  and 
adopted  the  deities  of  Greece,  who  could  be 
identified  verbally,  for  the  most  part,  with 
kindred  psychic  illusions  of  her  own.  The 
Hellenic  religion  was  exceptionally  anthropo- 
morphic ;  so  that  the  accretions  to  the  Roman 
theology  were  also  exceptionally  anthropo- 
morphic. The  psychic  illusions  gained  in 
humanity  as  well  as  in  personality. 

Both  Rome  and  Greece  were  profoundly  in- 
fluenced by  this  amalgamation  :  Greece  because 
her  spiritual  decadence  received  a  rejuvenated 
vigour  as  a  parasitical  growth  upon  the  Roman 


78  A  THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

stock ;  Rome  because  her  psychic  illusions, 
instead  of  passing  normally  into  disillusions, 
were  transformed  with  facility  into  more  subtle, 
because  more  human,  forms  of  faith. 

Greece  was  unable  to  rejuvenate  her  faith 
for  herself  :  evolution  seems  always  to  be  un- 
able to  rejuvenate  religious  faith  without  ex- 
traneous help,  because,  in  spite  of  the  obvious 
abundance  of  material  constantly  supplied  by 
the  less  subtle  intellects  of  the  uneducated, 
the  intelligence  of  the  more  highly  developed 
classes  will  always  be  so  far  superior  that  it  will 
crush  out  of  existence  the  increase  of  illusion 
which  alone  can  save  the  State.  Hellenic  civili- 
sation really  died  with  Alexander  of  Macedon 
in  323  B.C. — the  history  of  Cherson  occurs  to 
one  as  demanding  consideration  under  this 
head,  but  it  falls  rather  into  the  history  of 
that  general  parasitic  rejuvenation  known  as 
the  Byzantine  Empire. 

Any  rejuvenation  of  Hellenic  culture  at  an 
early  date  could  only  take  place  outside  the 
sphere  of  Greek  political  influence,  and  yet 
sufficiently  near  to  that  sphere  not  to  be  cut 
off  utterly  from  its  civilising  influence.  It 
could  most  easily  happen  in  a  community  that 
was  not  racially  altogether  unrelated.  Finally, 
it  could  only  appear  in  a  community  which  had 


EARLY   ROMAN   CIVILISATION  79 

evolved  independently  the  psychic  illusions 
necessary  to  bring  it  into  a  position  of  local 
security.  The  very  illusions  which  had  led 
Rome  so  far  were,  it  would  seem,  unable  to 
lead  her  farther,  because  illusion  in  her  primi- 
tive deities  necessarily  would  have  become  dis- 
illusion, unless  those  deities  were  humanised 
by  transformation. 

This  humanisation  of  Roman  theology  was  a 
chief  part  of  the  great  work  that  Greece 
performed  for  Rome  and  the  world. 


CHAPTER    III 
THE  AUGUSTAN   AGE 

THE  transformation  of  Roman  religion  under 
Hellenic  influence,  and  the  consequent  con- 
firmation of  psychic  illusions  enabled  the 
Romans  to  make  almost  a  new  beginning  in 
their  religious  life  ;  and  they  were  thus  able 
to  reach  a  higher  grade  of  intellectual 
development  than  apparently  would  have 
been  possible  under  the  old  religious  regime. 
From  B.C.  197,  when  the  two  provinces  of 
Spain  were  settled,  until  B.C.  49,  when  Julius 
Caesar  completed  the  conquest  of  northern 
Gaul,  Roman  history  externally  is  little  more 
than  a  list  of  Roman  advances  towards 
European  Hegemony.  The  Hellenisation  of 
Roman  religion  precedes  or  synchronises  with 
the  first  half  of  this  period.  The  psychic 
illusions  of  Rome  thus  transformed  were 
superior  to  those  of  any  of  the  conquered 
peoples.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  that  this 


THE  AUGUSTAN  AGE  81 

coincidence  is  fortuitous.  Is  it  not  simpler 
to  assume  that  there  is  a  causal  connection, 
and  that  we  may  detect  here  the  explanation 
of  the  facts?  The  renovated  faith  gave  to 
each  Roman  believer  the  illusion  which  alone 
could  induce  him  to  master  his  selfish  and 
rational  impulses,  and  to  act  with  that  personal 
irrationality  which  was  conducive  to  the  com- 
munal progress.  It  is  difficult  to  see  any  other 
satisfactory  analysis  of  motives  and  results. 

Any  student  can  note  with  ease  the  distinct 
difference  in  religious  feeling  at  Rome  between 
the  beginning  and  the  end  of  this  period.  At 
the  beginning  the  illusions  were  young  and 
vigorous.  Scipio  is  the  hero  of  it,  a  veritable 
hero  of  romantic  illusion,  as  we  see  him  in  the 
pages  of  Livy.  Julius  Caesar  is  the  protagonist 
of  the  end,  and  he  is  not  a  romantic  figure 
governed  by  illusions,  but  rather  the  disillu- 
sioned practical  man  acting  for  his  own 
interests — a  fact  that  becomes  the  clearer  the 
more  closely  we  study  the  accounts  of  his 
foreign  arid  civil  wars.  Psychic  illusions  had 
little  influence  upon  Julius  Caesar  personally. 

We  need  feel  no  surprise  that  the  effects  of 
a  dying  faith  long  continued  to  be  felt  in 
spite  of  its  apparently  moribund  condition. 

For  our  knowledge  of  Roman  religion  comes 

6 


82  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

to  us  directly  from  the  writings  of  the  most 
cultured  and  intellectual  spirits  of  the  age- 
that  is,  from  the  very  men  in  whom  disillu- 
sion first  would  be  obvious  ;  so,  in  reading 
them  only,  without  intimate  knowledge  of  the 
intellectual  conditions  of  the  mass  of  the  people 
around  them,  we  are  apt  to  imagine  that  the 
minds  of  our  authors  are  typical  of  the  age  :  we 
must  be  even  more  strongly  on  our  guard 
against  this  fallacy  in  the  study  of  ancient 
Roman  history  than  we  find  it  necessary  to  be 
in  the  consideration  of  modern  times,  where 
writing  is  so  very  easy  and  so  general.  The 
faith  of  Roman  writers  can  never  have  failed 
to  be  ahead  of  the  common  faith  of  the  Roman 
people,  both  in  times  of  growth  and  of  decay. 

In  a  lesser  degree  this  will  also  be  true  of 
all  the  prominent  Roman  soldiers  and  states- 
men, who  would  tend  to  be  men  of  exceptional 
vigour  in  their  generation.  No  doubt  the  faith 
of  Rome  was  always  many  decades  behind  the 
faith  of  the  individual  Romans  of  whom  we 
read. 

But  even  more  worthy  of  note  is  the  impetus, 
as  it  were,  under  which  the  effects  of  an  intel- 
lectual movement  are  observable  long  after 
their  efficient  cause  has  ceased  to  operate. 
Thus  conquest  became  almost  a  habit  with  the 


THE  AUGUSTAN  AGE  83 

Romans.  In  this  way  we  can  see  how  it  was 
that  the  Roman  State  continued  to  increase— 
Dacia  was  made  a  province  in  106  A.D. — long 
after  the  tide  of  decadence  definitely  had  set  in. 

In  the  Augustan  age  Roman  civilisation 
seemed,  no  doubt,  to  the  Romans  to  be  estab- 
lished as  securely  as  the  seven  hills  themselves  : 
it  was  impossible  for  contemporaries  to  detect 
the  germs  of  the  coming  degeneration.  But 
such  germs  certainly  were  being  nourished  by 
the  fading  of  the  psychic  illusions  of  an  earlier 
time.  Meanwhile  Rome  was  at  the  apex  of 
her  vigour ;  at  no  time  did  her  intellectual 
life  reach  a  higher  standard  than  in  the  princi- 
pate  of  Augustus.  Augustus  was  a  man  of 
supreme  practical  ability,  and  so,  like  many 
other  great  rulers  of  mankind,  he  realised,  by 
intuition  or  observation,  no  doubt,  rather  than 
by  any  intellectual  process  of  deduction,  that 
to  secure  indefinitely  for  himself  and  his  heirs 
the  position  which  he  had  come  to  hold  in  the 
State,  it  was  desirable  to  invigorate  the  religion 
of  his  people. 

There  can  be  little  doubt  that  we  should  be 
wrong  in  supposing  that  Augustus  had  any 
personal  faith  in  the  deities  whose  cult  he 
advocated.  That,  however,  is  a  matter  of 
opinion  based  on  a  balance  of  probabilities. 


84  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

In  any  case  we  must  admire  the  unerring 
instinct  which  led  Augustus  to  see  in  the 
rejuvenation  of  her  ancient  religion  the  only 
hope  that  Rome  could  have  of  stemming  the 
tide  of  decadence.  Augustus  was  supremely 
right,  but  in  actual  fact  he  was  attempting  the 
impossible.  Disillusion  was  coming  to  reign 
in  the  hearts  of  Romans  with  a  sway  that  no 
imperial  rescripts  or  examples  could  overcome. 

Vergil  used  all  the  magic  of  his  verse  vainly 
in  the  same  cause  ;  the  whole  Aeneid  is,  in  a 
sense,  an  attempt  to  reconstruct  the  Hellenised 
religion  of  Rome — to  reinspire  the  moribund 
faith  of  a  disillusioned  patriotism.  For  this 
purpose — the  purpose  more  especially  of 
Augustus— the  Aeneid  was  a  failure  ;  it  could 
not  be  otherwise  than  a  failure,  for  psychic 
illusions  cannot  be  constructed  artificially ; 
they  are  a  natural  growth,  an  inherent  and 
necessary  antecedent,  according  to  our  theory, 
of  the  organic  evolution  of  civilisation. 

But  if  the  Aeneid  was  a  failure  as  an  instru- 
ment of  psychic  regeneration,  it  remains,  of 
course,  a  brilliant  success  as  a  work  of  art. 
I'rom  this  side,  also,  it  has  a  peculiar  interest 
for  us  in  our  present  task  of  studying  the 
development  of  Roman  civilisation  ;  for  in  no 
other  work  can  we  see  more  clearly  the  trans- 


THE  AUGUSTAN   AGE  85 

cendent  influence  of  Hellenic  culture  upon 
Roman  thought.  The  reference  here  is  not  so 
much  to  the  more  obvious  imitations  of 
Homeric  and  Alexandrian  models,  and  the 
general  affectation  of  Greek  grammar  and 
Greek  syntax,  as  to  the  more  subtle  infiltration 
of  Hellenic  culture  into  the  very  life-blood  of 
the  poem.  The  Aeneld  is  not  a  typically  Greek 
nor  a  typically  Roman  poem,  but  a  typically 
Greco-Roman  poem  ;  it  is  the  fruit  of  the  civi- 
lisation that  resulted  from  the  rejuvenation  of 
Hellenic  culture  under  the  power  of  Roman 
vigour.  Greece  alone  could  not  have  produced 
such  a  poem  at  this  stage,  because  her  intellect 
—if  we  look  at  it  in  theoretical  isolation — was 
far  gone  in  the  decay  that  resulted  from  her 
loss  of  psychic  illusions — a  loss  again  that 
resulted  from  the  increased  intelligence  pro- 
duced by  these  very  psychic  illusions.  Rome 
alone  could  not  have  produced  the  Aeneid,  for 
the  whole  scheme  of  its  characterisation,  both 
in  the  case  of  its  divine  and  of  its  human 
dramatis  personae,  is  saturated  with  Hellenic 
personal  individualisation. 

It  may  be  repeated  once  more  that  the 
writing  of  Vergil,  and  indeed  the  whole 
Augustan  intellectual  life,  was  in  advance  of 
the  general  scheme  of  Roman  intelligence. 


86  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Vergil  seems  always  to  be  writing  down  to  the 
level  of  the  previous  literary  generation,  and 
the  genius  of  the  writer  appears  in  the  subtle 
way  in  which  he  could  thus  appeal  to  lower 
minds  while  retaining  another  artistic  appeal, 
in  the  second  intention,  to  the  highest  intellects 
among  his  contemporaries.  It  is  just  this 
bilateral  appeal  which  makes  it  so  difficult  for 
us  men  of  the  twentieth  century  at  first  to 
endorse  unreservedly  the  artistic  estimate 
which  the  criticism  of  the  ages  has  laid  upon 
his  works. 

The  strength  of  the  Augustan  policy  lay  in 
its  reactionary  nature,  and  in  nothing  can  we 
admire  the  marvellous  cleverness  of  Augustus 
more  than  in  his  attempts  to  retain  the  tide  of 
progression  at  the  high  level  which  it  reached 
in  his  principate  by  the  support  which  he  gave 
consistently  to  all  reactionary  religious  prin- 
ciples. Unconsciously,  no  doubt,  he  was  seek- 
ing to  re-establish  the  psychic  illusions  which 
were  slipping  away  from  the  minds  of  the 
Romans. 

The  attempt  was  useless  because  a  psychic 
illusion  is  an  organic  growth,  not  a  work  of 
artificiality.  But  he  was  laying  his  finger  upon 
the  weak  spot,  and  we  must  regard  with  admir- 
ation the  intuition  which  was  able  to  detect 


THE  AUGUSTAN  AGE  87 

this  spot.  As  Merivale  says,  in  contrasting 
Augustus  with  Julius  Caesar  :  "  He  was  more 
inclined  for  his  own  part  to  lend  all  his  weight 
to  support  the  old  National  traditions " 
(Merivale:  History  of  Rome,  chap.  51).  As 
a  matter  of  fact  they  were  Greco-Roman  tra- 
ditions for  the  most  part,  and  as  such  neither 
very  old  nor  very  national ;  but  the  Romans 
never  acknowledged  their  enormous  debt  to 
the  Greeks,  whether  from  patriotic  pride  or 
from  mere  inadvertence. 

The  contrast  between  Julius  Caesar  and 
Augustus  is  interesting  in  the  following  respect. 
They  were  both,  it  seems,  quite  disillusioned, 
but  where  Julius  in  his  conduct  appeared  to 
acquiesce  in  this  fact,  Augustus,  on  the  con- 
trary, tried  to  act  in  opposition  to  it.  Augustus 
was  so  far  right  in  that  he  saw  that  the  rein- 
vigoration  of  psychic  illusion  in  religion  was 
essential  to  the  complete  success  of  his  policy  ; 
but  Julius,  in  a  deeper  sense,  was  right  in  ignor- 
ing this,  because  the  reinvigoration  of  psychic 
illusion,  at  any  rate  apart  from  extraneous 
assistance,  was  impracticable.  No  doubt 
neither  of  the  two  had  any  very  definite  sense 
of  these  things,  because  their  historic  outlook 
was  too  limited  for  that ;  we  would  hardly  be 
justified  in  blaming  Augustus  for  the  lack  of 


88  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

success  in  his  reactionary  religious  attempts, 
and  probably  we  would  have  no  more  justifi- 
cation for  praising  Julius  because-  actually  he 
chose  the  more  sensible  course ;  it  is  very 
doubtful  that  he  chose  it  because  he  knew  that 
such  a  policy  as  Augustus  afterwards  adopted 
was  foredoomed  to  failure.  Julius,  however, 
was  a  man  of  such  extraordinary  genius  that 
it  is  by  no  means  impossible  that  he  recognised 
this. 

In  working  out  his  policy  with  regard  to 
religion,  Augustus  found  a  useful  lieutenant, 
after  the  death  of  Vergil,  in  Ovid.  Ovid's 
Metamorphoses,  and  more  especially  his  Fasti, 
were  clearly  part  of  the  Augustan  determina- 
tion to  renovate  as  much  as  possible  the  power 
of  Roman  religion. 

The  last  poem  of  the  Metamorphoses,  which 
tells  of  the  transformation  of  Julius  Caesar  into 
a  star,  was  intended  to  give  a  religious  sanction 
for  the  inauguration  of  imperial  autocracy. 
The  apotheosis  of  Julius  was  the  first  of  a  long 
series  of  imperial  apotheoses.  Many  writers 
have  been  content  to  dismiss  such  things  as 
trivial  absurdities.  It  does  not  seem  to  be 
satisfactory  thus  to  pass  by  them.  We  may 
look  upon  the  Augustan  apotheosis  of  Julius 
as  part  of  the  general  Augustan  policy,  which 


THE  AUGUSTAN   AGE  89 

aimed  at  a  reconstruction  of  psychic  illusions. 
A  divine  father — even  a  father  by  adoption — 
was  an  actual  assistant  in  strengthening 
Augustus  in  his  personal  supremacy.  An  ele- 
mental Caesar,  eternal  in  the  heavens,  was  a 
continuous  influence  upon  the  actions  of  each 
man  who  believed  in  his  divinity.  It  is  hardly 
consonant  with  the  character  of  Augustus  that 
he  was  actuated  merely  by  family  pride.  He 
had  rather  a  definite  prudential  object  in  view 
in  this  attempt  to  rear  a  psychic  illusion  round 
the  name  of  Caesar  ;  Vergil  had  already  made 
a  move  in  the  same  direction  when  he  sought 
to  connect  the  name  of  Julius  with  the  demi- 
divine  lulus. 

There  is  no  difficulty  in  coming  to  the  con- 
clusion that  apotheosis  reacted  as  a  psychic 
illusion  upon  the  authority  of  the  living 
emperors,  increasing  its  influence  by  giving  a 
sort  of  antecedent  divine  sanction  to  their 
autocracy .  We  know  how  important  the  doctrine 
of  the  divine  right  of  kings  became  in  much 
later  times,  and  something  of  the  same  divinity 
still  hedges  many  of  the  monarchies  of  Asia. 
Certainly  the  readiness  with  which  later  Roman 
emperors  paid  the  honour  to  their  predecessors 
makes  it  appear  to  be  fairly  probable  that  the 
early  attempt  of  Augustus  was  not  without 


90  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

practical  result.  As  was  pointed  out  before, 
such  results  would  occur  in  the  hearts  of  the 
uneducated  many  rather  than  in  the  brains  and 
the  writings  of  the  educated  few  ;  therefore 
we  need  hardly  wonder  that  direct  references 
to  the  success  of  the  illusion  are  lacking  to  us 
in  the  classical  histories.  An  indirect  result, 
partly  achieved  in  this  manner,  is  to  be  seen 
in  the  uninterrupted  course  of  autocracy  that 
dates  from  Augustus. 

The  illusion  that  thus  began  to  surround  the 
imperial  household  was  in  no  way  opposed  to 
the  general  Augustan  policy  which  advocated 
a  renewed  faith  in  the  personalities  of  the 
older  gods  ;  for  the  Greco-Roman  faith  had 
never  looked  upon  its  hierarchy  as  definitely 
complete ;  it  had  introduced  foreign  deities 
with  much  the  same  readiness  that  the  old 
Roman  faith  had  shown  in  accepting  the  attri- 
butes of  the  Hellenic  divinities.  The  worship 
of  Isis,  for  example,  was  introduced  from 
Egypt  towards  the  end  of  the  republic,  and 
became  exceedingly  popular  in  the  early  period 
of  the  empire.  We  can  see  that  such  introduc- 
tions might  tend  towards  an  increased  psychic 
illusion  when  the  feeling  towards  older  deities 
—older,  that  is,  in  Rome— was  inclining 
towards  disillusion.  So  we  may  surmise  that 


THE  AUGUSTAN  AGE  91 

evolutionary  progress  would  favour  the  growth 
of  new  illusions  in  foreign  deities. 

Similarly,  then,  the  individual  or  the  muni- 
cipality that  accepted  without  hesitation  the 
divine  metamorphosis  of  a  dead  emperor  would 
tend  to  be  actuated  in  conduct  by  motives  of 
an  altruistic  irrationality,  and  so  advance  in 
the  social  scale  at  the  expense  of  unbelieving 
neighbours. 

Augustus  and  his  poetical  and  political  lieu- 
tenants almost  certainly  were  actuated  by  no 
motives  of  personal  piety  in  the  attempt  to 
reinvigorate  the  life  of  Olympianism.  Look- 
ing back  over  nearly  two  thousand  years,  we 
can  see  the  somewhat  academic  artificiality  of 
their  efforts  ;  but  this  artificiality  was  not  so 
obvious  to  the  contemporary  masses  of  the 
Roman  people. 

There  is  always  a  tendency  in  the  unintel- 
lectual  to  accept  as  proved  facts  the  definite 
statements  of  the  intellectual.  Certainly  we 
cannot  suppose  that  the  ordinary  Roman  felt 
the  philosophic  scorn  of  a  Tacitus  towards  the 
Augustan  teaching.  Indeed,  if  this  had  been 
so,  the  attempt  would  have  been  too  obviously 
futile  to  have  appealed  to  a  man  of  the  undeni- 
able intelligence  of  Augustus.  His  attempts  to 
rejuvenate  a  personal  faith  in  the  divinities  of 
Olympus  show  us  that  the  faith  was  a  living 


92  A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

factor  in  the  lives  of  the  majority  of  his 
subjects. 

The  empire  was  no  longer  confined  to  the 
city  of  Rome  ;  it  extended  far  beyond  even 
the  limits  of  Italy,  beyond  the  limits  of  the 
shores  of  the  Mediterranean.  In  the  vast 
numbers  who  inhabited  this  empire  the  unedu- 
cated far  exceeded  in  numbers  those  who,  in 
the  wildest  sense  of  the  word,  could  be  called 
educated,  and  amongst  the  ignorant,  psychic 
illusions,  even  of  the  most  ingenuous  kind, 
possess  an  extraordinary  vitality  and  power. 
A  sense  of  the  vital  and  powerful  personal 
existence  of  the  Olympian  divinities  was,  no 
doubt,  a  potent  factor  in  influencing  the 
conduct  of  the  majority  of  the  subjects  of 
Augustus.  And  Augustus  tried  to  work  upon 
this  sense  as  he  found  it  still  in  existence 
around  him. 

We  need  hardly  suppose  that  decadence  was 
productive  of  visible  effects  in  the  mass  of  the 
inhabitants  of  the  empire  at  this  period, 
although  we  can  trace  its  existence  in  the  intel- 
lectual work  of  the  cultured.  Augustus  was 
one  of  the  cultured  few  working  upon  the 
minds  of  the  uncultured  many ;  to  do  so  he 
made  use  of  the  psychic  illusions  which  still 
dominated  the  majority  of  the  people  of  the 
Roman  world. 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE   DECADENCE   OF  ROMAN 
CIVILISATION 

THE  decline  and  fall  of  faith  in  the  Olympic 
religion  is  treated  usually  as  an  incidental  fact 
in  the  general  decline  and  fall  of  the  Olympian 
civilisation.  It  is,  indeed,  looked  upon  as  an 
aspect  of  that  necessary  decay  of  civilisation 
which  comes  about  from  some  inexplicable 
cause  inherent  in  the  nature  of  man  and  his 
work.  If  we  look  upon  the  decline  of  faith 
as  a  loss  of  those  illusions  which  are  the  essen- 
tial cause  of  civilisation,  we  may  find  in  it 
perhaps  a  determinant  cause  of  the  decline  and 
fall  of  the  Roman  Empire. 

With  the  death  of  Marcus  Aurelius  in  A.D. 
1 80  we  may  note  that  this  tide  of  decadence 
definitely  had  set  in,  and  from  this  date 
until  A.D.  330,  at  any  rate,  when  Constantine 
moved  the  seat  of  empire  from  the  banks  of 
the  Tiber  to  the  shores  of  the  Bosphorus  we 

93 


94  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

see  a  continual  decrease  of  the  influence  of 
Rome  upon  the  world  to  the  advantage  of  the 
barbarians. 

On  the  literary  side  we  find  only  two  writers 
of  this  period  whose  greatness  is  beyond  ques- 
tion, Tacitus  and  Juvenal ;  the  dates  of  their 
deaths  are  unknown,  but  it  is  probable  that 
they  took  place  before  A.D.  130.  It  is  in 
agreement  with  a  theory  of  the  intellectual 
religious  causes  of  civilisation  that  decadence 
should  be  noticeable  in  literary  work  at  an 
earlier  period  than  in  political  facts  ;  we  have 
seen  a  similar  consecution  of  affairs  during  the 
period  of  growth  discussed  in  the  last  chapter. 

Tacitus  and  Juvenal  are  both  decadent 
writers.  They  both  lament  the  days  that  are 
gone,  but  they  preach  no  faith  that  can  renew 
the  spirit  of  those  days.  They  are  thoroughly 
disillusioned,  and  have  to  the  full  that  critical 
outlook  which  so  definitely  marks  the  decadent 
writer.  They  teach  no  psychic  illusions  to 
influence  the  minds  of  men  towards  an  irra- 
tional faith.  They  are,  indeed,  most  rational, 
and  have  only  reminiscent  and  regretful  hopes 
to  offer  of  a  return  to  republican  freedom  with 
its  puritanical  virtues. 

Juvenal,  in  spite  of  his  avowed  scorn  of 
lubricity,  is,  in  truth,  one  of  the  lewdest  writers 


DECADENCE   OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     95 

who  has  won  immortal  glory,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  suppose  in  reading  him  that  he  was  not 
taking  pleasure  in  discussing  at  length  the 
obscene  details  of  the  vices  which  he 
denounces . 

No  reader  of  the  first  book  of  the  Annals  of 
Tacitus  can  believe  that  the  author  was  inferior 
in  intellectuality  to  the  great  writers  of  the 
Augustan  age.  Yet  all  will  agree  that  he  is 
"  silver  "  and  not  "  golden." 

What,  then,  is  this  distinction  which  cuts 
him  off  indubitably  from  the  earlier  historians 
of  Rome?  Surely  it  is  just  the  lack  of  faith 
in  psychic  illusion  which  marks  the  distinction. 
He  has  lost  even  the  assumption  of  faith  which 
is  to  be  found  in  his  predecessors.  We  know 
in  our  hearts  that  it  is  inconceivable  to  suppose 
that  Tacitus  was  a  faithful  believer  in  the 
literal  sense  of  the  personal  divinity  of  the 
various  members  of  the  Olympian  hierarchy. 
He  had  lost  all  illusion,  however  much  he  may 
lament  the  loss  entailed  by  this  disillusion. 
His  political  desiderium  for  the  republican 
form  of  government  was  really  a  desiderium 
for  the  irrational  faith  of  an  earlier  age.  With 
our  wider  outlook  we  can  see  the  generality 
which  for  him  was  lost  in  particularity  ;  we  can 
see  that  no  mere  change  in  political  functions 


96  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

could  have  reinstated  the  former  majesty  of 
Rome.  Only  a  renewal  of  lost  illusion  could 
have  brought  about  that ;  and  such  a  renewal 
was  impossible  in  his  time,  because  religion  is 
born,  not  made,  is  an  organic  growth,  not  a 
work  of  art. 

Disillusioned  men  very  seldom,  perhaps 
never,  come  to  be  led  a  second  time  by  the 
same  illusion.  And  in  the  front  rank  of  the 
disillusioned  were  the  greatest  intellects  of  their 
generation  ;  they  were  the  men  who  guided  the 
movements  of  Roman  thought.  They  were 
rilled  with  the  bright  light  of  reason  ;  they 
could  see  their  way  clearly.  But  reason  was 
taking  men  down  the  long  slope,  where  only 
illusion  could  have  induced  them  to  scale  the 
difficult  heights,  as  illusion  had  led  their 
ancestors  to  scale  them. 

If  we  turn  from  the  pages  of  Tacitus  to  those 
of  the  Augustan  Histories,  the  decay  of  intel- 
lectual vigour  is  obvious — I  do  not  wish  to 
deny  that  biographies  such  as  those  of  Corn- 
modus  or  Heliogabalus  by  Aelius  Lampridius 
have  their  fascination  for  us,  but  we  have 
chiefly  to  consider  here  the  religious  side  of 
the  question. 

In  this  group  of  writers  the  whole  religious 
spirit  of  paganism  is  dead,  while  we  can  hardly 


DECADENCE   OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     97 

trace  the  beginnings  of  the  Christian  spirit. 
There  is  no  mention  of  the  Olympian  divinities 
as  personally  interfering  in  the  affairs  of  men  ; 
they  are,  at  the  most,  impersonal  abstractions, 
hardly  more  than  verbal  nonentities.  The 
psychic  illusions,  even  in  writers  of  an  inferior 
intellectuality,  are  entirely  lost. 

During  this  period  of  decline  each  individual 
must  have  acted  from  rational  prudential 
motives  that  had  no  ulterior  reference  to  irra- 
tional illusions  ;  that  is,  he  must  have  acted 
with  reference  to  an  almost  personal  selfishness 
— we  must  not  say  purely  personal  selfishness 
because,  of  course,  love  still  existed,  and 
motives  of  affection  must  have  had  their  con- 
tinual effects  upon  personal  conduct ;  without 
psychic  illusions  it  seems  impossible  to  see  that 
a  man  could  be  actuated  by  other  than  selfish 
motives  with  only  slight,  though  perhaps  fre- 
quent, modifications.  There  can  have  been 
none  of  those  grandly  irrational  actions  which 
can  be  inspired  alone  by  psychic  illusions . 

Accordingly  such  irrational  actions  as  are 
conducive  to  the  communal  advantage  at  the 
expense  of  the  individual  advantage  disappear 
from  the  pages  of  history.  We  find  no  more 
of  the  early  republican  deeds  of  a  romantic 
heroism. 

7 


98  A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

It  is  true  that  it  is  hardly  in  accordance 
with  sound  philosophy  to  take  the  misdoings 
of  certain  tyrannical  emperors  as  typical  of 
the  average  lives  of  ordinary  men.  The 
emperors,  with  whose  doings  the  chronicles 
especially  are  engaged,  certainly  were  in  an 
exceptional  position,  and  their  scheme  of  life 
was,  no  doubt,  exceptional.  Still,  even  the 
emperors  must  not  be  taken  away  from  the 
spirit  of  their  age.  The  world,  in  the  words 
of  the  well-known  saying,  always  has  such 
government  as  it  deserves,  for  otherwise 
government  cannot  endure,  certainly  not  in  the 
way  that  the  imperial  system  endured  in  Rome. 
Looking  not  at  particular  conspicuous  periods 
of  tyranny,  but  at  the  general  low  and  deteri- 
orating standard  of  government,  we  cannot 
but  admit  that  the  general  rules  of  conduct 
amongst  ordinary  men  must  have  been,  also, 
low  and  deteriorating. 

The  first  apparent  break  in  the  continuance 
of  the  decline  from  the  standard  of  the  period 
of  Augustus  occurs  in  the  time  of  the 
Antonines.  The  principate  of  Marcus  Aurelius 
(A.D.  161-180)  points  to  a  reaction  against  the 
regular  progress  of  decadence.  In  accordance 
with  our  theory  we  find  the  religious  explana- 
tion of  this  in  the  increased  vigour  of  philo- 


DECADENCE   OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     99 

sophical  religious  faith  about  this  period.  It 
was  the  first  sign  of  that  partial  regeneration 
which  became  more  clearly  marked  under 
Constantine  (A.D.  306-339).  A  flash  in  the 
pan  does  not  prove  that  light  is  not  about  to 
fail.  This  is  true  in  application  to  the  period 
of  the  Antonines,  when  the  decadence  was 
apparently  arrested. 

However,  the  more  philosophic  explanation 
is  this.  We  observed  towards  the  end  of  the 
republic  that  Hellenic  culture,  in  combination 
with  Roman  vigour,  produced  the  Olympian 
civilisation  that  centres  round  Augustus.  We 
must  here  trace  the  reaction  of  Roman  vigour 
upon  Hellenism ;  the  fruit  of  this  reaction 
became  apparent  in  the  impersonal  philosophic 
religion  that  flourished  under  Marcus  Aurelius. 

Such  impersonal  faith  is  ill-suited  to  produce 
psychic  illusion  in  the  minds  of  the  uncultured  ; 
it  is  a  religion  essentially  of  culture.  It  pro- 
duced here  no  great  results  in  popular  action. 
Indeed,  it  did  not  even  produce  very  great 
results  in  the  case  of  the  cultured  classes.  The 
story  of  the  campaign  of  Aurelius  against  the 
Marcornmanni  is  lacking  utterly  in  heroic 
episode — the  miracle  of  the  Thundering  Legion 
appears  to  be  a  later  invention. 

The  same  reaction  produced  a  more  abiding 


100         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

fruition  under  Constantine,  and  from  it  came 
the  long  and  wearisome  tale  of  the  Greek  and 
Byzantine  empires  down  to  A.D.  1453,  when 
the  Turks  captured  Constantinople.  But  this 
quickly  becomes  a  Christian  rather  than  an 
Olympian  matter.  Also  it  is  left  aside  because 
we  wish  here  to  keep  our  attention  fixed 
more  closely  upon  the  history  of  Western 
development . 

With  the  disillusion  that  accompanied  the 
failure  of  the  Olympian  faith  to  influence  man- 
kind any  longer,  civilisation  decayed  and  intel- 
lectuality declined.  One  casual  result  of  this 
increasing  decadence  is  the  poor  supply  of 
historic  writings  to  chronicle  the  details  of  the 
period.  Here  again  we  have  to  leave  Olympian 
ideals  and  turn  to  the  Christian  writers. 

If  we  presume  that  the  decline  and  fall  of 
the  Roman  empire  was  the  result  of  a  failure 
of  psychic  illusion  caused  by  the  natural  evo- 
lution of  disillusion  resulting  from  increased 
intelligence,  it  then  follows  that  a  new  period 
of  intellectual  progress  could  only  occur  as  the 
result  of  a  new  form  of  psychic  illusion  pro- 
duced by  a  new  faith.  This  psychic  illusion 
could  only  become  powerful  when  disillusion 
had  carried  men  down  the  slope  of  decivilisa- 
tion  until  they  were  sufficiently  unintellectual 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVIIJSATION     50 


to  accept  the  new  faith  unreservedly.  This 
state  of  affairs  would,  occur  first  amongst  thfe 
less  educated  classes.  In  actual  fact  we  find 
that  new  religions  are  grounded  in  the  hearts 
of  the  uncultured  many  rather  than  in  the 
brains  of  the  cultured  few.  It  was  so  with 
Christianity. 

Christ  was  born  during  the  principate  of 
Augustus  —  that  is,  at  the  high-water  mark  of 
the  Olympian  civilisation.  But  the  Christian 
faith  did  not  become  a  potent  factor  in  Roman 
politics  until  the  Romans  had  sunk  into  a  very 
lowly  state  of  culture,  because  the  men  of  the 
Roman  world  were  not  ready  to  accept  the  new 
illusions  until  they  had  passed  right  through  a 
period  of  disillusion. 

The  Olympian  civilisation  sank  into  decrepi- 
tude with  rapidity.  Five  hundred  years  saw 
the  utter  ruin  of  the  old  order,  while  almost 
another  thousand  years  had  to  elapse  before 
the  new  civilisation  had  become  the  dominant 
factor  in  European  existence.  Dissolution  is 
usually  the  speedier  process. 

It  is,  indeed,  very  difficult  to  settle  a  date 
for  the  lowest  point  of  civilisation  between  the 
two  periods  of  culture  whose  existence  we  can 
see  with  such  clearness.  Civilisation,  in  fact, 
seemed  to  remain  at  its  lowest  level  for  a  pro- 


tea      A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

tracted  lapse  of  time ;  for  this  we  may  account 
to  some  extent  by  the  increased  size  of  the 
area  upon  which  evolution  worked  in  building 
up  the  new  structure.  But  this  does  not  seem 
really  to  be  a  sufficient  and  satisfactory  explan- 
ation, for  there  appears  little  reason  that  the 
new  civilisation  should  have  been  larger  than 
the  old.  The  difference  in  size  seems  almost 
to  be  incidental.  We  may  note,  however,  the 
tendency  of  civilisations  to  spread,  by  direct 
educational  infection,  over  larger  areas  than 
those  in  which  they  originated,  and  so  to 
operate  on  the  intelligences  always  of  larger 
numbers,  whose  descendants  thus  become  more 
fitted  to  join  in  the  advance  of  any  smaller 
areas  which  subsequently  may  be  influenced 
by  evolution  towards  a  renewed  civilisation. 
Also,  we  must  not  f<ail  to  allow  for  the  catho- 
licity of  Christian  teaching  ;  Christianity  was 
actually  more  responsive  to  notions  of  universal 
brotherhood  than  the  Olympian  faith. 

However  that  may  be,  the  old,  almost  local 
Olympian  illusion  now  had  to  give  place  to  a 
much  more  widely  extended  illusion,  which  was 
finally  to  gain  the  majestic  proportions  of  the 
Catholic  Church. 

It  was  in  Rome  that  the  old  Greco -Roman 
civilisation  sank  into  decay ;  it  was  in  Rome 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     103 

that  the  old  psychic  illusions  were  lost ;  so, 
too,  it  was  in  Rome  that  the  new  religion  came 
to  power. 

It  was  necessary  for  the  disillusioned 
Romans  to  find  their  new  faith  in  the  myste- 
rious distances  of  time  and  of  place,  otherwise 
there  would  have  been  no  illusion.  And 
above  all,  it  was  psychic  illusion  that  had  to 
be  evolved  somehow  and  somewhere  in  order 
that  a  new  civilisation  might  in  turn  be  evolved 
from  the  new  psychic  illusion.  Or,  to  put  it 
otherwise,  the  men  who  could  accept  the  new 
illusion  without  reserve,  and  who  could  be 
influenced  by  it  in  their  daily  conduct,  were 
those  who  would  belong  to  the  communities  or 
nations  whose  future  greatness  was  being 
evolved.  Now,  such  men  first  would  be  found 
elsewhere  than  in  the  disillusioned  society  of 
Rome,  where,  as  has  been  pointed  out  already, 
the  most  thoroughly  disillusioned  spirits  always 
during  the  period  of  decadence  must  have  been 
the  leaders  of  the  intellectual  life  of  the  less 
disillusioned.  Consequently  it  was  at  first 
elsewhere  than  in  Rome  that  evolution  found 
the  necessary  illusion. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  soon  as  men  in  the 
true  Roman  world  had  sunk  into  a  sufficiently 
unintelligent  condition  to  accept  a  new  psychic 


104         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

illusion,  they  would  be  driven  through  evolu- 
tion to  accept  the  best  form  of  illusion  which 
came  their  way — just  as  the  best  variation  is 
selected  by  evolution  to  procreate  the  new 
species.  The  best  illusion  from  the  evolu- 
tionary point  of  view  would  be  that  which  could 
lead  men  to  a  position  of  dominant  intellectual 
vigour. 

As  to  the  actual  geographical  locality  of 
the  birth  of  the  new  religion,  the  state  of 
affairs  at  this  period  is  not  unlike  that  which 
we  considered  in  the  birth  of  the  Greco-Roman 
faith  and  civilisation  at  Rome  on  the  outskirts 
of  the  old  Hellenic  culture.  Similarly  the  new 
illusion  is  found  on  the  outskirts  of  the  Olym- 
pian culture  in  Judaea,  where  the  inhabitants, 
as  we  know  from  the  Old  Testament,  had 
evolved  an  intellectuality  superior  to  that  of  the 
other  peoples  on  the  edge  of  the  Greco -Roman 
civilisation. 

Judaism,  however,  was  not  in  close  relation- 
ship to  the  Olympian  illusion,  and  this  is  an 
important  point,  for  primitive  Roman  thought, 
on  the  other  hand,  had  been  related  closely  to 
the  old  Hellenic  culture.  Therefore  the  tran- 
sition from  Judaism  to  Roman  Christianity  was 
not  such  a  simple  matter  as  the  transition  from 
pure  Romanism  to  Greco-Romanism.  It  was 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     105 

a  much  slower  process.  It  was  necessary  for 
ancient  Judaism  to  take  upon  itself  its  new 
and  diverse  aspect  in  primitive  Christianity, 
before  the  Greco-Roman  culture  could  assimi- 
late it.  This  appears  to  be  a  prominent 
reason  why  Judaism  had  to  undergo  the  trans- 
formation into  Christianity  before  Olympian 
intellectuality  could  coalesce  with  it  to  form 
the  Catholic  civilisation.  Also  it  was  practi- 
cally necessary  that  in  some  way  Judaism 
should  get  rid  of  its  old  doctrine  of  exclusion  ; 
and  this  doctrine  of  the  essential  difference 
between  Jew  and  Gentile  was  such  an  integral 
part  of  the  old  Judaism  that  we  can  hardly  see 
how  the  difficulty  could  have  been  overcome 
by  evolution  otherwise  than  by  the  dichotomic 
gap  that  separates  Judaism  from  Christianity. 
Our  knowledge  of  primitive  Church  history 
comes  to  us  so  exclusively  from  the  writings  of 
men  actuated  by  a  fervent  faith  in  their  own 
psychic  illusion  that  we  have  difficulty  in  dis- 
tinguishing facts  from  legendary  accretions, 
added  in  order  to  increase  the  miraculous  value 
of  Christianity  at  the  expense  of  paganism. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  if  half  the  legends 
were  literally  true,  no  sane  man  could  have 
failed  to  embrace  Christianity  with  immediate 
conviction. 


106         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

The  Olympian  civilisation  at  first  was  not 
ready  to  accept  Christian  doctrines,  and  we 
have  the  numerous  Pauline  and  Johannine 
writings  to  show  the  eagerness  of  early 
believers  to  gain  to  their  side  the  intellectual 
part  of  Olympian  civilisation.  But  the  process 
of  disillusion,  as  we  have  seen,  had  still  to 
descend  far— down,  indeed,  until  disillusion 
had  become  almost  indistinguishable  from  the 
other  intellectual  factors  of  life.  Intellectuality 
had  to  make  a  new  start  almost  from  the  lowest 
point  in  order  that  the  psychic  illusion  of  the 
new  religion  might  dominate  the  relatively 
highest  intelligences  of  their  times,  for  the 
highest  intelligences,  as  has  been  said,  are 
always,  of  necessity,  the  leading  and  directing 
intelligences.  It  was  not  sufficient  that  the 
relatively  unintelligent  inhabitants  of  the 
Roman  empire  should  accept  the  illusion  ;  it 
was  imperative  from  the  evolutionary  point  of 
view  that  the  relatively  intelligent  inhabitants 
also  should  accept  it,  because  the  intelligent 
were  the  leaders  of  thought,  and  therefore  the 
leaders  of  mankind  in  the  coming  times. 

Finally,  then,  the  disillusioned  reached  the 
stage  when  their  disillusion  became  merged  in 
the  general  failure  of  intellectual  vigour  ;  then, 
and  only  then,  the  new  psychic  illusion  really 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     107 

began  to  take  its  place  as  the  dominant  factor 
in  European  thought.  Evidently,  then,  we 
cannot  lay  too  much  stress  on  the  necessity  of 
the  absolute  deadening  of  intellectuality  in  the 
space  between  the  Olympian  civilisation  and 
the  Christian  civilisations,  because  it  is  by 
grasping  this  necessity  that  we  realise  the  ulti- 
mate importance  of  the  new  psychic  illusion, 
the  ultimate  dependence  of  future  progress 
upon  the  establishment  of  a  new  irrational 
faith.  That  men  might  be  induced  to  act  in 
the  irrational  spirit  which  alone  would  lead 
them  to  perform  the  acts  that  accord  with 
communal  progress  towards  a  higher  state  of 
civilisation,  it  was  essential  that  the  new 
psychic  illusion  should  have  the  unreserved 
domination  of  their  intelligence. 

To  acquire  this  new  illusion  it  was  necessary 
that  men  should  lose  entirely  the  former  disil- 
lusion, for  even  a  little  leaven  of  disillusion 
in  the  higher  intelligences  would  have  tended 
by  the  power  of  its  rational  intellectuality  to 
increase  disproportionately. 

Thus  we  can  see  that  the  Greco -Roman 
world  was  not  ready  in  the  fourth  century  to 
embrace  Christianity  unreservedly :  it  had  to 
descend  to  lower  depths.  As  it  descended  the 
potential  strength  of  the  new  illusion  was 


108         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

increasing  continually  by  the  mere  lapse  of 
time.  For  the  greater  the  number  of  years 
since  the  historical  events  related  in  the  New 
Testament,  the  greater  the  potentiality  of  belief 
in  the  legendary  accretions  that  were  growing 
up  round  the  life  of  Christ  and  of  His  apostles. 

Also,  perhaps  it  is  not  fanciful  to  note  here 
the  momentum  which  carries  a  resultant  pro- 
gression farther  than  it  might  be  expected  to 
go.  That  such  a  momentum  in  evolution  is 
not  utterly  fantastic  is  shown  by  the  fact  that 
biologists  have  postulated  its  existence  in  the 
evolution  of  organisms,  especially  in  the  case 
of  extinct  groups  (cf.  Dr.  Smith  Woodward's 
presidential  address  to  the  Geological  Section 
of  the  British  Association,'  1909).  It  is 
suggested,  then,  that  such  momentum  in  the 
decadence  of  the  Roman  empire  led  to  an 
inherited  rationalism  which  made  the  domi- 
nance of  the  new  psychic  illusion  come  into 
power  at  a  later  period  than  at  first  seems 
necessary. 

There  is  another  point  in  which  also  we  can 
see  a  cause  for  this  retardation.  The  decline 
of  intellectuality  throughout  the  Roman  world 
produced  a  slackening  of  the  linguistic  tension 
so  important  for  the  preservation  of  the  purity 
of  the  Latin  language.  And  so  in  Italy  the 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     109 

Latin  language  became  softened  towards  the 
Italian  language.  To  a  slight  extent  in  Italy, 
and  to  a  much  larger  extent  outside  Italy— to 
an  extent  increasing  with  the  increase  of  the 
difficulties  of  constant  access  to  the  centre  of 
Roman  thought— an  allied  result  was  produced 
by  the  admixture  of  barbarian  races,  not 
originally  speaking  the  Latin  tongue.  Italian 
resembles  Latin  more  closely  than  do  French 
and  Spanish. 

Here  for  us  it  is  the  degeneration  of  Latin 
into  Italian  that  has  a  much  greater  interest 
than  its  parallel  degeneration  into  French  and 
Spanish,  because  in  Italy  the  influence  of  bar- 
barian admixture  was  presumably  less — this 
suggestion  is  given  with  some  diffidence, 
because  Italy  undoubtedly  formed  an  especially 
attractive  field  of  plunder  to  the  barbarians  ; 
but  probably  Italy  always  had  a  large  enough 
population  to  absorb  any  number  of  barbarians 
that  actually  invaded  her.  It  would  seem, 
therefore,  that  the  decline  of  intellectuality  was 
the  main  cause  of  the  deterioration  of  the  Latin 
tongue.  Now  this  deterioration  in  Italy,  and 
a  similar  deterioration  along  with  a  larger 
admixture  from  foreign  sources  in  France  and 
Spain — other  provinces  of  the  empire  are 
omitted  here — led  to  the  production  of  at  least 


110         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

three  different  languages  which  came  to  be 
mutally  incomprehensible.  This  would  cut  off 
the  men  speaking*  these  languages  from  the 
literature  written  in  Latin.  This  certainly  must 
have  tended  to  retard  the  evolution  of  a 
renewed  intellectuality  in  all  three  countries, 
though  to  a  slightly  different  extent  in  each  of 
the  three  according  to  local  circumstances. 
Historically  we  see  that  the  new  civilisation 
reached  its  highest  point  at  different  periods 
in  Italy,  France,  and  Spain. 

Now  the  linguistic  isolation  of  these  three 
races,  who  owed  their  culture  primarily  to  the 
same  source  in  Rome,  must  have  been  inclined 
to  act  against  the  early  Catholicity  of  Christi- 
anity. It  would  seem,  then,  that  we  have  here 
an  analogous  variation  which  actually  was 
opposed  to  the  final  consummation  for  which 
evolution  was  working.  At  least,  we  can 
hardly  feel  sure  that  any  profit  even  in  the 
rivalry  of  pure  intellectuality  accrued  from 
their  segregation. 

It  therefore  became  necessary  for  evolu- 
tion to  acquire  a  sacred  language,  the  uni- 
versality of  which  would  tend  towards  the 
desirable  catholicity.  Latin  thus  became  the 
Catholic  language  of  Mediaevalism,  a  fact 
which  actually  bore  great  fruit  in  the  ultimate 


DECADENCE  OF  ROMAN  CIVILISATION     111 

outcome  in  increasing  intellectuality  through 
the  revival  of  classical  learning  towards  the 
time  of  the  Renaissance,  especially  in  the 
countries  rather  far  distant  geographically  from 
Rome. 

In  the  long  decadence  of  the  Roman  empire 
the  lack  of  military  enterprise  in  the  nations 
of  Rome  became  more  and  more  apparent. 
Gibbon,  in  his  fifth  chapter,  deals  at  some 
length  with  the  details  of  this  subject  under 
"  Septimus  Severus." 

But  speaking  in  more  general  terms,  we  may 
note  that  the  decline  of  psychic  illusion  must 
have  had  the  effect  upon  each  man  of  making 
him  always  less  inclined  to  endure  personal 
sacrifices  for  the  communal  advantage.  The 
rational  selfishness  of  the  decadent  Romans 
acted  consistently  in  opposition  to  the  principle 
of  altruistic  devotion,  which  alone  could  have 
been  conducive  to  a  communal  regeneration. 

Leaving  now  the  question  of  decadence,  we 
may  turn  rather  to  that  growth  of  the  new 
psychic  illusion  which  is  the  history  of  the 
Christian  Church  during  the  ages  of  faith. 


CHAPTER    V 
THE  DARK  AGES 

SOME  aspects  of  the  decline  and  fall  of  the 
Olympian  civilisation  having  been  considered, 
it  now  remains  for  us  to  note  a  few  of  the  more 
important  points  in  the  growth  of  the  new 
psychic  illusion. 

The  doctrine  of  the  new  faith  which  had 
the  greatest  influence  upon  the  progress  of 
mankind  is  that  of  the  immortality  of  the  soul, 
of  the  existence  of  the  individual  in  a  life 
after  death.  It  seems  clear  that  this  is  the 
cardinal  point  of  the  new  illusion  :  it  was  upon 
this,  and  upon  this  alone,  that  the  power  of 
the  new  faith  in  its  early  days  hinged.  The 
Olympian  faith,  indeed,  had  preached  the  illu- 
sion of  immortality ;  but  it  had  preached  it 
in  most  uncertain  terms.  '  The  doctrine  of 
a  future  state,"  says  Gibbon  (chap,  xv.),  "  was 
scarcely  considered  among  the  devout  poly- 
theists  of  Greece  and  Rome  a  fundamental 

112 


THE  DAEK  AGES  113 

article  of  faith."  Philosophic  declarations  and 
arguments,  such  as  we  find  in  Plato  and  other 
writers  who  copied  him  at  a  later  date,  did  not 
appeal  to  the  ordinary  man.  Christianity 
preached  immortality  as  a  definite,  indubitable 
fact. 

Now  the  dominant  hold  of  Christianity  upon 
the  intelligence  of  the  ages  of  faith  is  shown 
in  nothing  more  clearly  than  in  the  unreserved 
acceptance  of  this  doctrine  of  immortality  by 
mankind.  So  completely  was  it  accepted  that 
little  direct  mention  is  made  of  it  in  the  writings 
of  the  period.  It  is  left  unmentioned  in  ordi- 
nary life  :  it  is  taken  for  granted.  But  really 
we  cannot  over-estimate  its  importance  in  the 
evolution  of  modern  civilisation ;  for  on  it 
depended  the  whole  faith  in  the  psychic  illusion 
which  was  holding  sway  now  over  Europe. 

On  it  depended  the  ultimate  unimportance  of 
the  individual  life  on  earth  in  comparison  with 
the  individual  endless  life  hereafter  in  heaven 
or  hell :  this  meant  that  the  life  on  earth  might 
be  sacrificed  with  facile  ease,  if  security  of 
peace  and  happiness  after  death  were  beyond 
doubt. 

Once  this  great  point  had  been  evolved  into 
unquestionable  certainty,  the  evolution  of  the 
primarily  unessential,  but  secondarily  neces- 

8 


114         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

sary,  additional  doctrine  was  a  simple  little 
affair — the  doctrine,  that  is,  by  which  the 
eternity  of  life  became  an  eternity  of  happi- 
ness as  a  result  of  actions  which  were  to  the 
communal  advantage.  The  establishment  of 
these  two  doctrines  was,  according  to  our  theory, 
the  chief  function  of  the  new  faith.  More 
than  that,  it  was  a  cause  of  the  new  faith  ;  the 
position  even  may  be  stated  thus — that  the 
doctrines  of  Christianity  were  evolved  in  order 
to  give  a  psychic  sanction  to  this  belief  in 
immortality.  The  old  faith  in  the  deities  of 
Olympus,  with  its  offspring  in  philosophic 
Deism,  had  done  its  great  work  in  leading  men 
to  the  Olympian  civilisation  ;  and  it  had  now 
passed  away.  Only  this  new  belief  in  the 
existence  of  the  immortal  soul,  which  would 
feel  eternally  the  pleasures  or  pains  resulting 
from  the  actions  of  life  on  earth,  could  give 
the  necessary  illusion  to  lead  men  to  a  renewed 
civilisation  after  the  disillusion  which  caused 
the  decline  of  the  Olympian  civilisation. 

The  outlines  of  our  theory  of  European 
civilisation  may  be  repeated  once  more.  The 
faith  in  the  Olympian  deities  was  evolved 
because  it  led  men  up  to  the  Olympian  civi- 
lisation :  the  increase  of  intellectuality  which 
accompanied  this  civilisation  led  to  disillusion, 


THE  DARK  AGES  115 

and  this  disillusion  was  the  loss  of  faith  in  the 
Olympian  deities  :  from  this  followed  the 
decline  and  death  of  the  Olympian  civilisation. 
Only  a  new  illusion  could  lead  mankind  to  a 
new  civilisation,  and  this  new  illusion  is  bound 
up  inextricably  with  a  belief  in  the  eternity  of 
an  existence  of  which  the  nature  depended 
upon  the  actions  of  a  man's  life. 

It  was  the  first  great  function  of  Christianity 
to  make  this  belief  in  immortality  into  a  vital 
influence  upon  the  conduct  of  each  individual. 
The  pagan  adumbration  of  the  doctrine  of  im-*! 
mortality  could  produce  only  a  faint  impression, 
"  soon  obliterated,"  as  Gibbon  says  (chap,  xv.), 
"  by  the  commerce  and  business  of  life."  But 
Christianity  sought  to  give  a  faith  that  never 
was  absent  from  the  heart  of  the  believer, 
whose  every  action  was  thus  performed  with 
reference  to  that  faith. 

Such  a  faith  actually  did  exist  generally 
throughout  the  European  area  at  the  com- 
mencement of  the  long  ascent  to  modern  civili- 
sation. Historically  we  can  assert  that  it 
existed,  and  theoretically  we  can  conclude  that 
it  must  have  existed.  For  it  is  this  general 
faith  that  produced  the  individual  actions  which 
in  combination  form  the  communal  conduct 
that  led  mankind  to  our  civilisation.  The 


116         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

individual,  instead  of  being  actuated  by  motives 
that  referred  only  to  the  present  or  immediate 
future,  was  actuated  now  by  motives  that  had 
their  ultimate  reference  in  a  life  beyond  death. 

No  doubt  evolution  was  continually  at  work 
in  making  such  motives  harmonise  with  a  con- 
tinuous advance  towards  the  goal  of  civilisa- 
tion :  but,  in  this,  evolution  merely  was 
repeating  what  had  been  done  formerly  in  its 
main  features  during  the  evolution  of  the 
Olympian  faith — for,  to  speak  in  general  terms, 
what  was  held  to  be  a  virtuous  act  in  Augustan 
Rome  is  held  to  be  a  virtuous  act  to-day,  and 
ultimately  the  motives  that  influenced  men 
towards  the  evolutionary  desira,ble  actions  in 
primitive  Rome  were  similar  to  the  motives 
that  influenced  the  early  Christian  towards  his 
evolutionary  desirable  actions.  It  was  the 
proximate  cause  that  differed,  not  the  ultimate, 
or  rather  sub-ultimate,  cause. 

This  belief,  then,  in  the  eternity  of  the  exist- 
ence of  the  soul  was,  if  our  theory  is  correct, 
the  dominant  feature  in  the  victory  of  Chris- 
tianity over  paganism.  The  work  of  evolution 
in  fixing  the  details  of  the  form  of  this  belief 
has  come  to  us  in  the  history  of  the  numerous 
heresies  out  of  which  the  Catholic  faith  finally 
was  evolved.  Heresy  is  the  name  by  which 


THE  DARK  AGES  117 

Catholicism  knows  those  forms  of  faith  that 
were  rejected  by  evolution  as  unsuitable  for 
the  advancement  of  civilisation.  Let  us  con- 
sider a  few  of  them  in  greater  detail. 

Gnosticism,  which  found  its  first  leader  in 
Cerinthus,  a  contemporary  of  St.  John,  origi- 
nated within  the  reaction  of  Hellenic  culture 
under  the  Greco -Roman  civilisation,  especially 
at  Alexandria.  Reference  has  been  made 
already  to  this  important  reaction.  Gnosticism 
accepted  fully  the  doctrine  of  the  immortality 
of  the  soul.  The  rejection  of  Gnosticism  was 
necessary  because  it  minimised  the  illusion  of 
the  personal  incarnation  of  God  as  Christ  in 
Jesus.  According  to  the  Gnostics  Christ  used 
the  body  of  Jesus  merely  as  a  temporary  abode 
from  which  to  teach  men  by  the  exemplification 
of  perfection. 

Such  a  theory  had  a  special  fascination  for 
the  more  intellectual  members  of  the  early 
Church— Basilides  and  Marcion  were  promi- 
nent both  as  Gnostics  and  as  scholars — for  it 
was  almost  a  rational  theory.  We  can  see  that 
the  acceptance  of  Gnosticism  would  have 
tended  to  weaken  the  psychic  illusion  in  the 
divinity  of  Jesus  Christ  in  the  early  days  of  the 
Church,  by  reducing  the  reality  of  the  incarna- 
tion to  an  imaginary  and  spiritual  hypothesis, 


118         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

of  which  the  shadowy  unreality  could  have  had 
little  practical  influence  upon  the  conduct  of  a 
man.  Now  a  prominent  factor  in  the  value  of 
the  Catholic  theory  of  the  Incarnation  was  that 
it  brought  home  to  the  ordinary  man  the  reality 
of  the  divinity  of  an  ordinary  man  as  incarnate 
God ;  and  this  theory,  it  would  seem,  was 
especially  effective  in  influencing  the  conduct 
of  an  individual  by  its  appeal  to  the  presumed 
possibilities  of  ordinary  life  as  they  appeared 
to  the  uncultured. 

The  rejection  of  Gnosticism  has  a  further 
interest  in  leading  to  the  evolution  of  a  cultured 
erudition  within  Christianity  to  overcome  the 
gnosis  of  the  comparatively  cultured  heretics. 

Evolution  thus  brought  about  the  accept- 
ance of  the  irrational,  and  this  increased  the 
strength  of  the  Church  numerically,  for  the 
uncultured,  who  could  accept  the  irrational 
without  difficulty,  were  in  a  numerical 
majority  :  at  the  same  time,  it  laid  the  founda- 
tion of  that  growth  of  intellectuality  which 
is  the  inseparable  concomitant  of  improved 
civilisation.  The  acceptance  of  the  irrational, 
at  the  same  time,  was  all  in  favour  of  an 
increase  in  the  power  of  the  psychic  illusion 
of  the  divine  origin  of  the  founder  of  Chris- 
tianity. The  men  to  whom  we  owe  special 


THE  DARK  AGES  119 

gratitude  for  the  rejection  of  a  rational  Gnos- 
ticism—its rejection  was  of  indubitable  value 
in  the  advancement  of  Christian  civilisation- 
were  Irenaeus,  whose  great  work  was  pub- 
lished A.D.  182-8,  Tertullian,  and  Clement  of 
Alexandria. 

The  successor  of  pure  and  rational  Gnos- 
ticism was  the  dualistic  system  of  Manichaeism . 
Its  origin,  though  involved  in  hopeless  confu- 
sion, seems  to  point  to  an  attempt  to  fuse 
Christianity  with  Parseeism  :  also  some  con- 
nection with  Buddhism  is  to  be  found.  For 
us  it  is  more  important  to  try  to  see  why 
evolution  had  to  reject  Manichaeism  in  the 
production  of  modern  civilisation. 

The  inherent  defect  of  Manichaeism,  from 
the  evolutionary  point  of  view,  was,  again,  the 
small  value  it  gave  to  the  personality  of  the 
incarnate  Christ.  It  was  an  attempt  to 
rationalise  the  difficulties  of  the  existence  of 
both  good  and  evil  in  a  world  made  by  God. 
"  If,"  said  the  Manichaean,  "  God  is  good  and 
almighty,  why  does  he  permit  evil  to  exist?" 
A  rational  answer  to  that  question  is  the 
hypothesis  of  a  spirit  of  evil  of  practically 
equivalent  power  to  the  good  God.  But,  as 
rationalism  essentially  is  opposed  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  civilisation,  it  was  necessary  that  the 


120         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

irrational  Catholic  doctrine  of  the  existence  of 
the  good  and  almighty  God  who  produced  all 
things,  including  evil,  should  be  victorious 
under  the  power  of  evolution  working  towards 
the  higher  civilisation  of  man.  Consequently 
the  comparatively  rational  doctrine  of  Mani- 
chaeism  was  eliminated  by  evolution. 

The  rationalism  of  Gnostic  principles  in  all 
their  ramifications  was  in  accordance  with  the 
teachings  of  Hellenic  philosophy  or  Asiatic 
theosophy  ;  and  therefore  it  was  in  direct  dis- 
agreement with  the  disillusion  of  Greco-Roman 
intellectuality.  This  brings  clearly  before  us 
the  basis  of  the  opposition  with  which  Catholi- 
cism met  these  heresies.  It  was  all  the  time 
essential  to  the  ultimate  success  of  the  evolution 
of  a  Christian  civilisation  that  the  psychic  illu- 
sions of  the  truth  of  the  irrational  should  hold 
unquestioned  sway  over  the  minds  of  men. 

The  doctrine  of  the  divine  Logos,  as  we 
find  it  in  Philo,  seems  to  have  arisen  as  an 
attempt  to  give  a  rational  psychic  illusion, 
which,  by  its  rationality,  could  reconcile  the 
intellects  of  the  philosophic  to  the  irrationality 
demanded  by  the  necessity  of  ultimate  advance. 
There  is  a  lack  of  precision  in  the  details  of 
such  Christology  with  regard  to  the  personality 
of  the  Deity  which  seems  to  have  militated 


THE  DARK  AGES  121 

against  its  power  in  furthering  the  psychic  illu- 
sion of  the  Incarnation ;  and  from  this  we 
may  account  for  its  subsequent  failure  to  take 
a  position  of  dominant  importance  in  the 
advance  of  the  Catholic  Church.  But  it  was 
certainly  useful  to  some  extent  in  fostering  that 
intellectuality  which  ultimately  was  to  be  of 
such  importance  in  the  Christian  civilisations. 
Origen,  indeed,  tried  to  be  more  precise  than 
his  predecessors,  and  accepted  the  inferiority 
of  the  Logos  to  the  Father  ;  but  in  so  doing 
he  was  opening  the  way  for  Arianism,  which, 
as  we  shall  see,  had  to  be  rejected  finally. 

The  doctrine  of  Arius  may  be  considered 
the  grand  attempt  of  Gnosticism  to  minimise 
the  divine  personality  of  Christ,  to  rationalise 
the  conflicting  notions  of  his  perfect  divinity 
and  of  his  necessary  inferiority  as  the  Son  of 
the  Father.  The  two  notions  are,  in  fact,  irre- 
concilable ;  but  to  some  extent  Arius  preached 
a  rational  form  of  doctrine  in  accepting  the 
inferiority  of  Christ  as  the  Son.  His  chief 
opponent,  Athanasius,  upheld  the  irrational 
doctrine  that  Christ,  though  he  was  the 
begotten  Son  of  God,  was  at  the  same  time  in 
absolute  equality  of  Godhead  with  the  Father  : 
Athanasius  supported  this  completely  irrational 
assumption  while  rejecting  Origen's  attempted 


122         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

explanation  of  eternal  generation,  whatever 
that  may  have  been  supposed  to  mean. 

Happily  there  is  no  need  for  us  to  try  to 
grasp  the  subtle  intentions  of  these  casuistical 
disputes  of  Nicaea,  which  raised  such  furious 
passions  in  Christendom.  But  it  is  of  interest 
for  us  to  grasp  what  would  have  been  the 
results  of  the  success  of  Arianism.  It  would, 
indeed,  have  been  the  conversion  of  Chris- 
tianity into  a  modified  polytheism.  Though, 
as  we  shall  see,  Catholicism  at  a  later  period 
became  practically  polytheistic,  the  time  was 
not  yet  ripe  for  this  :  it  would  have  been  in 
opposition  to  the  evolution  of  those  mono- 
theistic principles  which  were  the  basis  of  the 
acceptance,  by  such  intellectuality  as  then 
existed,  of  the  psychic  illusion  of  the  young 
religion.  Once  again,  too,  we  can  note  that 
Arianism,  like  the  older  system  of  Gnosticism, 
was  rational  where  the  Catholic  doctrine  of 
Athanasius  was  irrational.  And  the  establish- 
ment of  a  belief  in  the  truth  of  the  psychic 
illusion  of  the  irrational  was  still  the  aim  of 
evolution,  as  the  means  of  producing  finally 
the  dominance  of  intellectuality  in  modern 
civilisation. 

If  we  accept  the  theory  that  psychic  illusion 
is  the  exciting  cause  of  civilisation,  the  whole 


THE  DARK  AGES  123 

question  of  the  struggles  of  the  heresies  in 
the  early  centuries  of  the  Christian  era  rises 
to  an  importance  which  otherwise  it  had  ceased 
to  have,  even  for  the  most  faithful  Christian. 
It  is  no  longer  a  question  of  the  history  of 
the  way  in  which  the  true  doctrine  made  itself 
clear  of  error,  but  rather  of  the  reason  why 
evolution  chose  the  Catholic  form  of  faith 
rather  than  any  form  of  Gnosticism.. 

Gnosticism  was,  indeed,  antagonistic  to  the 
full  acceptance  of  the  psychic  illusion  of 
perfect  manhood  and  perfect  Godhood  in 
Christ.  If  it  had  not  been  rejected,  it  would 
have  meant  that  rationality  was  not  rejected  ; 
it  would  have  led  to  a  rational  explanation 
of  Christianity,  which,  in  a  comparatively  short 
space  of  time,  would  have  meant  disillusion  ; 
and  disillusion  would  have  meant  that  Europe 
was  not  to  arrest  the  decline  and  fall  of  the 
Roman  empire ;  and,  therefore,  was  not  to 
rise  to  the  new  heights  of  the  Catholic 
civilisation. 

The  Council  of  Nicaea,  with  its  promulgation 
of  the  Nicene  Creed,  was  really  a  stupendous 
feature  in  the  history  of  Europe ;  for  from 
it  we  may  date  the  beginning  of  the  triumph 
of  that  irrational  Catholicism  which  was  to  lead 
men  so  very  far.  The  defeat  of  Arius  meant  the 


124         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

prolonged  success  of  that  psychic  illusion  with- 
out which  men  could  not  be  induced  to  perform 
the  irrational  actions  which  essentially  were 
opposed  to  the  selfish  dictates  of  reason. 

But  historically  we  know  that  the  decadence 
of  Rome  and  the  Roman  empire  in  actual 
fact  did  not  cease  with  the  Council  of  Nicaea 
in  325,  and  we  may  suppose  that  this  was 
caused  partly  by  the  very  subtle  and  intricate 
nature  of  the  disputes  between  Arians  and 
Catholics.  They  formed  a  problem  which  the 
ordinary  man  of  little  education  could  not  be 
expected  to  grasp  in  all  its  delicate  bearings. 
Indeed,  it  is  a  difficult  problem  for  us  to  grasp, 
even  though  we  are  far  removed  from  the  heat 
of  the  conflict,  and  even  though  we  have  the 
help  of  many  erudite  writers,  both  ancient  and 
modern,  who  have  spent  their  ingenuity  in 
elucidating  its  difficulties. 

The  defeat  of  Arius  did  not  entail  the 
immediate  annihilation  of  Arianism,  which  long 
survived  under  various  forms  among  various 
communities,  and  is  even  still  to  be  found 
among  us  as  a  living  variety  of  Christian  faith. 
This  persistence  of  rationalism,  among  the 
Christians  of  the  fourth  and  subsequent 
centuries,  was,  no  doubt,  an  important  factor 
in  prolonging  the  decadence  of  Roman  thought. 


THE  DARK  AGES  125 

We  have  to  remember,  also,  the  momentum 
which  the  world  had  acquired  at  this  period 
by  heredity  in  its  downward  course  ;  this 
momentum  had  to  carry  mankind  far  before  the 
new  psychic  illusion  was  enabled  to  take  such 
a  form  that  it  could  elevate  people  once  more 
into  a  new  civilisation,  the  civilisation  of  the 
Renaissance. 

It  is  from  the  fourth  century  onwards  that 
the  legendary  stories  of  the  saints  begin  to 
fill  prominently  the  history  of  Christianity .  The 
lives  of  the  saints  from  our  point  of  view  regain 
their  old  importance,  because  they  emphasise 
the  triumph  of  psychic  illusion  over  the  minds 
of  men.  We  ought  not  to  be  content  with 
smiling  at  the  puerile  absurdities  with  which 
they  abound  ;  we  have  to  remember  that  once 
men  accepted  such  absurdities  as  true  ;  psychic 
illusion,  in  fact,  was  to  this  extent  triumphant 
over  rational  scepticism  ;  and  the  evolution  of 
belief  in  the  truth  of  the  illusion  was  of  con- 
summate importance  to  the  progress  of  man- 
kind towards  civilisation.  For  this  unreserved 
faith  in  the  absurd  must  have  had  its  con- 
tinuous effect  upon  the  actions  of  individuals. 
Men  were  not  actuated  by  selfish  motives  of 
personal  or  quasi-personal  welfare,  but  by  a 
dominant  faith  in  the  presence  and  the  interest 


126         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

of  the  sainted  dead,  who  regarded  every  action, 
and  could  punish  or  reward  every  act,  even 
if  not  personally,  at  any  rate  by  reference  to 
a  higher  authority. 

Saint-worship  thus  was  adopted  in  the  later 
stage  of  Catholic  evolution  as  a  secondary 
support  to  the  psychic  illusion  of  the  ever- 
watchful  eye  of  Christ.  It  naturally  involved 
the  danger  of  a  return  to  polytheism  ;  and, 
therefore,  we  find  little  or  no  insistence  upon 
it  in  the  early  days,  when  such  a  return  might 
have  involved  Christian  worship  in  the  deca- 
dence and  disillusion  of  the  moribund 
Olympianism ;  and  it  was  clearly  to  the 
evolutionary  advantage  of  Christianity  to  avoid 
this  danger.  Even  when,  at  last,  the  danger 
became  sufficiently  distant  to  permit  the  estab- 
lishment of  an  authorised  worship  of  the  saints, 
it  was  still  found  desirable  to  regulate  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  worship  of  Christ  and  the 
reverence  due  to  the  saints. 

Evolution  could  not  permit  the  regularisa- 
tion  of  saint-worship  in  the  early  centuries  of 
our  era  ;  even  at  the  beginning  of  the  fifth 
century,  when  Nestorianism  was  the  leading 
heresy  against  which  evolution  had  to  contend, 
we  find  that  Catholicism,  while  opposing  the 
other  doctrines  of  Nestorius,  joined  with  him 


THE   DARK  AGES  127 

and  supported  him  in  protesting  against  the 
practice  of  calling  the  Blessed  Virgin  the 
"Mother  of  God." 

The  history  of  the  cult  of  the  Blessed  Virgin, 
indeed,  forms  a  convenient  centre  from  which 
to  comment  upon  the  growth  of  saint-worship. 
The  cult  seems  to  have  originated  as  early  as 
the  fourth  century,  but  only  in  such  obscure 
sects  as  the  Collyridians,  in  whom  Epiphanius 
denounced  the  practice.  Augustine  shortly 
afterwards  promulgated  the  dogma  that,  while 
the  Blessed  Virgin  partook  of  the  general 
corruption,  she  was  free  from  actual  transgres- 
sion. Such  a  notion  leads  eventually  to  the 
doctrine  of  active  worship  of  Mary  which  could 
permit  Aquinas  (  1225  or  1227-74)  to  speak  of 
her  as  "all  our  hope  of  salvation."  This  is  a 
dualism  which  in  practice  becarne  Polytheism 
in  everything  but  name. 

But  the  value  of  the  cult  of  the  Blessed 
Virgin,  in  these  later  days,  lay  in  the  definition 
it  gave  to  the  psychic  illusion  of  the  practical 
existence  and  personal  interference  of  the 
Blessed  Virgin  in  the  ordinary  actions  of  men. 
Such  a  faith  in  the  real  help  of  the  Blessed 
Virgin  in  the  conduct  of  everyday  life  gave 
a  humanity  to  the  divine  illusion  which  the 
purer  and  more  ancient  direct  worship  of  Christ 


128         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

was  in  danger  of  losing.  And  the  reality  of 
the  illusion  was  necessary  to  the  evolution 
of  civilisation,  because  such  illusion  alone  could 
have  the  essential  result  of  influencing  indi- 
viduals in  the  details  of  their  conduct  to  dis- 
regard selfish  motives  under  the  guidance  of 
altruistic  principles. 

Saint-worship  in  general  popularised  the 
influence  of  psychic  illusion  by  its  closer  appeal 
to  the  participants  of  daily  life,  of  whom  the 
population  of  the  world  is  composed.  The 
reality  of  Christ  was  becoming,  in  fact,  a  hypo- 
thetical proposition,  verbally  accepted  but 
practically  ineffective  upon  the  conduct  of 
the  majority  of  men.  Saint -worship  was 
evolved  in  order  to  reinvigorate  the  illusion 
that  was  becoming  too  ethereal.  In  fact,  it 
made  Catholicism  catholic. 

The  popularisation  of  Christianity  was  of 
great  importance  geographically  to  its  pro- 
gress, because  the  inhabitants  of  the  old  Roman 
empire  were  mostly  uncultured.  It  reinvigo- 
rated  the  influence  of  Christianity,  not  merely 
in  Italy  but  throughout  the  European  area. 
That  is,  it  tended  towards  the  diffusion  of  the 
new  civilisation  far  beyond  the  centres  of 
the  Olympian  civilisation.  France  and 
Germany,  Spain  and  England  were  all 


THE  DARK  AGES  129 

to  play  prominent  parts  in  the  new  civili- 
sation ;  whereas  Olympianism  practically  was 
confined  to  Italy  and  its  immediate  neighbour- 
hood. Evolution  hardly  can  have  worked 
directly  for  an  increase  in  the  area  of  the  new 
civilisation.  It  acts  rather  upon  an  intensifica- 
tion of  civilisation  in  a  limited  area  ;  then  only 
indirectly,  to  a  dimensional  extension. 

This  dimensional  extension  seems  to  have 
followed  as  a  sort  of  analogous  variation,  con- 
sequent upon  the  direct  evolution  of  civilisa- 
tion—at any  rate,  in  so  far  as  that  resulted  from 
the  psychic  illusion  of  saint -worship.  But  the 
reaction  of  the  dimensional  extension  of  civili- 
sation upon  the  internal  quality  of  that 
civilisation  was  of  great  historical  importance  ; 
for  evolution  in  this  way  obtained  a  larger  and, 
above  all,  a  more  varied  supply  of  material 
upon  which  to  work — more  varied  because  the 
materials  themselves  originally  had  formed 
their  Christian  civilisation  upon  the  varying 
bases  of  unlike  pagan  psychic  illusions  ;  and 
these  varying  bases  had  led  to  variations  in 
the  form  of  the  acceptance  of  the  Christian 
psychic  illusion. 

It  was  this  quantitative  and  qualitative 
variational  difference  that  made  the  Catholic 
civilisation  take  such  different  forms  in  different 

9 


130         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

places — in  England,  for  instance,  and  Italy. 
It  also  made  it  possible  for  Protestantism  to 
grow  up  inside  Christianity  while  the  Catholic 
civilisation  was  still  in  its  early  maturity.  But 
to  that  point  we  shall  return  in  the  following 
chapter. 

When  we  look  back  over  the  whole  period 
with  which  we  are  concerned  in  the  present 
chapter,  out  of  the  exasperating  confusion  of 
uncertain  details  we  can  gather  the  general 
trend  of  development.  The  earlier  centuries 
were  interested  passionately  in  subtle  ques- 
tions dealing  with  the  internal  economy  of  the 
Holy  Trinity.  These  centuries  slowly  fixed 
upon  the  intelligence  of  Europe  the  accept- 
ance of  the  irrational  Catholic  doctrine.  The 
very  irrationality  of  this  form  of  faith  made 
it  all  the  more  suitable  to  be  the  basis  upon 
which  the  subsequent  centuries  were  to  build 
their  great  structure  of  psychic  illusion  in  the 
Catholic  Church. 

But  the  psychic  illusion  of  the  immanence 
of  Christ  had  not  a  sufficiently  close  relation 
to  the  humanity  of  man  to  produce  the  Catholic 
Church.  The  interposition  of  intermediaries 
in  the  saints  strengthened  greatly  the  psychic 
illusion  dealing  with  the  birth  of  Christianity, 
by  bringing  innumerable  personalities  into 


THE  DARK  AGES  131 

active  connection  with  the  affairs  of  men ; 
the  saints  of  the  Middle  Ages  were  to  faithful 
Christians  real  personalities  ;  and,  therefore, 
they  were  real  instruments  in  the  furtherance 
of  the  evolution  of  the  Catholic  civilisation, 
both  qualitatively  and  quantitatively ;  for  they 
acted  continuously  upon  the  motives  and 
resultant  conduct  of  the  faithful. 

When  Dante  wrote  his  Divine  Comedy,  about 
1320,  psychic  illusion  reigned  supreme  in  the 
brains  of  Europe.  Men  might  vary  in  the 
form  of  their  faith — they  did  not  vary  much, 
however— but  the  substance  of  the  Christian 
faith  was  believed  universally.  Individual 
aberrations  into  heresy  did  not  affect  the 
general  belief  in  the  truth  of  the  illusion.  The 
effect  of  this  Catholic  diffusion  of  Catholicism 
must  have  been  enormous,  influencing  every 
act  of  every  man  in  a  way  which  we  find  it 
difficult  to  realise,  because  we  have  moved  so 
far  in  these  last  six  hundred  years.  Catholi- 
cism was  a  living  faith  which  could  make  even 
Henry  IV,  an  emperor-elect,  sprawl  in  the  snow 
at  Canossa  before  Gregory  VII.  Similar 
examples  are  innumerable. 

During  the  ages  of  faith  evolution— if  we 
may  thus  personify  a  principle— was  not  con- 
cerned directly  with  the  increase  of  intellec- 


132         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

tuality  :  it  was  concerned  rather  with  the  estab- 
lishment of  a  psychic  illusion  which  could  ratify 
the  motives  of  actions  amongst  men  in  a  certain 
direction — in  the  direction,  that  is,  of  communal 
advantage ;  however,  the  members  of  such 
communities  as  were  developing  advan- 
tageously tended  in  the  long  run  to  become 
more  intellectual,  because  in  this  way  they 
gained  an  advantage  over  the  less  intellectual 
members  of  less  advantageously  developed 
communities . 

Incidentally,  also,  within  any  particular  com- 
munity the  more  intellectual  individuals  would 
tend  through  natural  selection  to  occupy  the 
better  social  positions ;  and  these  positions 
would  tend  again  to  descend  to  the  offspring 
of  such  individuals.  So  we  can  see,  to  some 
extent,  how  it  was  that  psychic  illusion  ulti- 
mately led  to  an  increase  of  intellectuality. 

This  result  is  not  a  little  surprising1,  if  re- 
garded superficially ;  for,  as  we  saw  above, 
psychic  illusion  is  per  se  irrational,  while  in- 
tellectuality is  per  se  rational ;  so  that  an 
increase  of  rationality  is,  as  it  were,  the  result 
of  an  increase  of  irrationality.  We  see  the 
same  seemingly  contradictory  state  of  affairs 
if  we  glance  again  synoptically  over  this  period. 

The  intricate  casuistry  of  the  earlier  heretical 


THE  DARK  AGES  133 

controversies,  in  spite  of  their  intricacy,  did 
not  lead  directly  to  any  period  of  increased 
intellectuality  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  led  to  the 
intellectual  stagnation  of  the  Middle  Ages  of 
faith  ;  and  it  was  from  the  unintellectuality  of 
the  later  Middle  Ages  that  the  new  intellec- 
tuality of  the  Catholic  civilisation  arose.  This 
curious  arrangement  of  the  course  of  develop- 
ment makes  it  very  clear  that  the  evolutionary 
progress  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  not  primarily 
in  the  direction  of  intellectuality — a  fact  that 
we  might  have  surmised  a  priori — but  merely 
in  the  direction  of  material  communal  advan- 
tage. We  know  historically  that  one  result  of 
this  was  the  rise  of  the  numerous  small  com- 
munes which  are  so  prominent  in  the  affairs 
of  Italy,  France,  and  the  Empire  in  the  period 
preceding  the  Renaissance.  But  these  small 
communes,  for  the  most  part,  became  merged 
in  the  larger  political  syntheses  which  have 
become  the  modern  nations.  Yet  the  same 
process  led  to  the  formation  both  of  the  small 
and  the  great,  the  process  of  the  evolution  of 
communal  advantage. 

The  resultant  increase  of  intellectuality, 
which  is  so  marked  in  the  Catholic  civilisation, 
was  evolutionary  only  a  secondary  point,  at 
any  rate  at  the  earlier  stages.  But  the  de- 


134         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

velopment  of  a  large  number  of  communities, 
advancing  upon  parallel  lines,  led,  by  the 
natural  increase  of  size  in  such  prospering 
communities,  to  a  struggle  for  existence 
between  them ;  they  jostled  one  another,  as 
it  were,  in  their  advance.  The  more  intel- 
lectual communities  tended  to  get  the  better 
of  the  less  intellectual,  because,  even  in  the 
most  barbarous  of  fights,  brains  are  as  impor- 
tant as  muscular  strength.  So  here  we  see  an 
increased  intellectuality  resulting  from  the 
unintellectuality  which,  by  evolution  in  the 
direction  of  material  communal  advantage,  had 
produced  the  rivalry  of  conflicting  com- 
munities. 

The  same  psychic  illusion  prevailed  through- 
out Europe  ;  and  this  produced  similar  results 
throughout  Europe,  differing  with  the  different 
bases  upon  which  it  worked— these  primordial 
differences  were,  no  doubt,  the  results  of  pri- 
mordial psychic  illusions  differing  inter  se. 
Thus,  in  the  thirteenth  century,  we  find  the 
whole  European  area  ripening  towards  a  civi- 
lisation much  more  widely  extended  than  the 
old  Olympian  civilisation.  Europe,  in  spite 
of  the  apparent  rivalries  of  nations,  was  really 
homogeneous  ;  for,  wherever  we  look,  we  find 
the  same  psychic  illusion  dominating  the  intel- 


THE  DARK  AGES  135 

ligence  of  men.  It  is  the  one  and  only  constant 
factor  in  the  situation,  and  this  in  itself  would 
be  enough  to  make  us  surmise  that  this  psychic 
illusion  was  the  efficient  cause  of  the  coming 
civilisation  which  was  spreading  over  all 
Europe. 


CHAPTER    VI 
THE   CHRISTIAN   CIVILISATIONS 

THE  election  of  Thomas  of  Sarzana  to  the 
papacy  as  Nicholas  V  in  1447  may  be  taken 
as  the  date  from  which  to  count  the  beginning 
of  the  history  of  the  Renaissance.  It  is  true 
that  most  writers  have  found  pleasure  in  mark- 
ing earlier  series  of  events  which  foreshadowed 
the  great  outburst  of  culture  in  Europe  of  the 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries.  Historically 
they  are  justified  in  doing  so,  for  the  evolution 
of  civilisation  is  a  continuous  process,  in  which 
one  epoch  becomes  the  next  by  subtle  grada- 
tions. It  is  only  after  a  long  lapse  of  time 
that  we  can  point  out  the  characteristic  traits 
that  distinguish  each  period. 

Thus  Olympianism  passed  into  Mediaeval- 
ism,  and  Mediaevalism  grew  into,  the  Catholic 
civilisation.  Upon  the  theory  outlined  in  this 
book,  we  look  upon  the  Catholic  civilisation 
as  the  outcome  of  the  dominant  faith  of  the 

136 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       137 

Middle  Ages  in  the  psychic  illusion  of  Catholic 
Christianity,  which  had  induced  men  uncon- 
sciously to  subordinate  their  personal  or  quasi- 
personal  motives  to  the  principles  tending 
towards  a  higher  civilisation. 

The  flower  of  Catholicism  bloomed  first  in 
Italy,  and  for  this  we  may  account,  amongst 
other  reasons,  by  the  fact  that  Italy  had  been 
the  centre  of  Olympianism,  which  had  left  there 
magnificent  brain-material  from  which  the  new 
intellectuality  could  be  formed.  Although  the 
inherent  greatness  of  this  material  largely  had 
lain  dormant  through  the  dark  period  of  the 
ages  of  faith,  we  may  presume  that  the 
potentiality  of  intellectuality  had  not  ceased  to 
underlie  the  apparent  ignorance  and  apathy. 
There  does  not  appear  to  be  much  difficulty  in 
accepting  this  supposition  :  it  corresponds  very 
closely  to  the  belief  in  the  existence  of  dormant 
characters  whose  potentiality  is  beyond  ques- 
tion in  biology. 

At  any  rate,  it  is  in  Italy  that  history  first 
traces  the  real  advent  of  Catholic  civilisation. 
But  there  at  once  we  notice  that  signs  of  the 
ensuing  decadence  are  not  wanting.  These 
signs  are  the  more  obvious  because  it  is  in 
political  matters  rather  than  in  artistic  pro- 
duction that  they  are  to  be  observed ;  and 


138         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

political  decadence,  leading  to  political  ruin, 
means  the  destruction  of  the  basis  upon  which 
even  artistic  production  ultimately  must  rest. 
It  is  curious  to  note  how  far  the  political  and 
moral  decadence  of  Italy  had  proceeded  before 
the  advance  of  the  artistic  current  was  diverted 
by  the  more  powerful  stream  of  non-artistic 
decadence.  This,  again,  shows  us  how 
thoroughly  artistic  was  the  whole  strength  of 
the  Catholic  civilisation.  Outside  the  realm 
of  art  the  Catholic  civilisation  in  Italy  had 
little  vitality.  It  is  for  its  artistic  productions 
only  that  to-day  we  remember  and  revere  and 
love  the  Italy  of  the  Renaissance. 

Politically  Italy  was  decadent  soon  after  the 
middle  of  the  fifteenth  century,  and  that  is 
why  the  Catholic  civilisation  of  Italy  was  so 
shortlived.  It  was  an  artistic  civilisation  result- 
ing from  a  very  human  polytheistic  Catholi- 
cism. By  A.D.  1495,  when  Charles  VIII  won 
the  battle  of  Fornovo,  political  decadence 
indubitably  was  the  dominant  feature  in  Italian 
history,  and  the  great  days  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance  may  be  said  to  close  under 
Clement  VII  with  the  sack  of  Rome  in  1527. 
Between  the  dates  1447  and  1527  Italy  gave 
to  the  world  a  group  of  men  of  genius  to  which 
we  can  find  no  parallel,  as  we  look  back 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       139 

through  former  centuries,  until  we  reach  the 
Augustan  period  in  Rome. 

Though  the  fact  is  obvious  that  the  crown- 
ing glory  of  this  period  was  its  artistic  work, 
there  is  for  us  perhaps  some  difficulty  in  grasp- 
ing the  reasons  why  the  intellectuality  of  the 
Renaissance,  especially  in  Italy,  should  have 
taken  this  artistic  bias,  almost  to  the  exclusion 
of  practical  politics.  It  is  so  different  from  the 
work  of  the  Greco -Roman  civilisation  which 
performed  such  mighty  feats  of  arms  in  estab- 
lishing the  dominion  of  the  Roman  empire. 
Some  analogy,  however,  may  be  found  in  the 
work  of  the  Athenian  civilisation,  which  must 
always  be  remembered  more  for  its  artistic 
and  literary  productions  than  for  its  purely 
political  operations.  We  ought,  then,  accord- 
ing to  our  theory,  to  find  a  similar  parallel 
between  the  psychic  illusions  that  preceded 
Athenian  civilisation  and  the  psychic  illusion 
of  Mediaeval  Europe.  Such  a  parallel  can  be 
drawn,  though  roughly,  yet  with  sufficient 
closeness  to  be  convincing. 

The  outstanding  feature  of  the  Hellenic 
religion,  as  we  see  it  in  Athens  in  the  fifth 
century  B.C.,  is  its  animistic  humanity.  Not 
only  were  there  individual  deities  in  every 
natural  object,  in  every  tree  and  hill  and  river, 


140         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

but  these  deities  were  essentially  human  in  their 
attributes  :  so,  too,  the  greater  deities  of  the 
Hellenic  hierarchy  were  essentially  human. 
This  marks  the  great  distinction  which  has  been 
noted  so  often  between  the  Hellenic  religion 
and  the  Egyptian  and  Oriental  mythologies. 
Anthropomorphism  was  the  special  distinction 
of  the  Hellenic  religion,  and  it  made  the 
civilisation  which  resulted  from  the  Hellenic 
religion  peculiarly  human— that  is,  peculiarly 
artistic. 

There  was  a  time,  anterior  to  the  production 
of  the  chief  wonders  of  Hellenic  art,  when 
every  Greek  accepted  whole-heartedly  the 
psychic  illusions  of  his  religion ;  and  these 
illusions  must  then  have  had  a  dominant  power 
over  his  conduct.  The  humanised  divinities, 
in  fact,  ruled  the  Hellenic  world,  and  gave  the 
humanised  and  humanising  art  of  Greece  to 
Europe,  an  art  that  was  singularly  free  from 
bestial  monstrosities. 

Now  the  analogies  between  the  Hellenic 
mythology  and  Catholic  saint-worship  are  not 
far  to  seek.  We  do  not  find,  and  we  ought  not 
to  expect  to  find  literal  parallels.  The  analo- 
gies are  all  the  more  convincing  because  they 
are  spiritual.  The  more  we  generalise,  the 
more  certain  we  may  be  that  the  analogies  have 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       141 

a  real  existence.  There  is  no  need  for  us  to 
try  to  identify  Zeus  with  Jehovah,  Apollo  with 
Christ :  such  identifications  may  be  over- 
accentuated  with  facility,  and  carry  us  into 
absurdities  against  which  we  must  be  on  our 
guard.  Nevertheless,  it  is  true  that  Hellenism 
found  humanised  divinities  everywhere,  and 
similarly  Catholicism  in  the  later  centuries  of 
the  Middle  Ages  found  its  saints  with  their 
human  attributes  everywhere,  ready  to  take  an 
interfering  interest  in  all  the  actions  of  man. 
In  both  cases  psychic  illusion  guided  the  con- 
duct of  believers  on  similar  lines,  on  the  lines 
marked  out,  so  to  speak,  by  evolution  as  lead- 
ing towards  civilisation  :  and  from  the  simi- 
larity between  the  forms  of  the  two  illusions 
we  need  feel  no  surprise  that  there  should  be 
a  corresponding  similarity  in  the  resultant 
artistic  nature  of  the  ancient  Athenian  civi- 
lisation and  the  Catholic  civilisation  of  the 
Renaissance. 

The  Athenian  civilisation  was  short-lived : 
we  may  confine  its  period  of  greatness  with 
sufficient  accuracy  to  the  seventy-seven  years 
between  481  and  404  B.C.  It  is  a  mere  co- 
incidence, of  course,  that  the  same  length  of 
time  within  three  years  also  elapsed  between 
the  election  of  Nicholas  V  and  the  sack  of 


U2         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Rome  by  the  army  of  the  Constable  de 
Bourbon,  which  are  the  events  which  deeper 
thinkers  have  placed  at  the  commencement  and 
close  of  the  greatest  period  of  Catholic  culture 
in  Italy.  But  it  is  not  a  coincidence  that  made 
the  two  periods  both  tend  to  occupy  a  similarly 
short  space  of  time  :  that  was  inherent  in  the 
nature  of  the  two  civilisations  which  corre- 
sponded so  closely  to  one  another,  and  which 
were  marked  out  pre-eminently  by  their  artistic 
productions. 

The  Catholic  civilisation  was  far  from  being 
confined  to  Italy  alone.  The  whole  of  Western 
Europe  partook  of  it  in  varying  degrees — we 
may  say  that  Western  Europe  artistically  bore 
a  similar  relation  towards  Florence,  Milan,  and 
Venice  to  that  borne  by  Greece  towards  Athens 
—for,  as  we  have  seen,  the  same  psychic  illu- 
sion dominated  the  whole  of  Christendom  in 
the  closing  centuries  of  the  Middle  Ages.  We 
may  note  the  arrival  of  the  Catholic  civilisation 
in  three  centres  besides  Italy,  namely  in  Spain, 
in  France,  and  in  England. 

But  in  Spain  the  natural  evolution  of  civilisa- 
tion was  distorted  by  two  factors.  Of  these  the 
first  is  the  influx  of  the  Arabs  from  Africa. 
Arabian  civilisation,  the  outcome  of  the 
Mohammedan  illusion  was  widely  different  in 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       143 

age,  and  also  in  its  innate  qualities,  from 
Catholic  civilisation  :  and  although  Catholicism 
eventually  crushed  it  in  Spain,  the  conflict  was 
so  protracted  and  severe  that  Mohammedanism 
left  indelible  traces  upon  the  evolution  of 
Spanish  civilisation.  The  second  factor  is  the 
discovery  of  America,  in  1492  A.D.,  which,  in 
Spain  more  than  elsewhere,  had  an  important 
influence  in  distorting  the  natural  growth  of 
Catholicism.  Therefore  we  cannot  con- 
veniently trace  the  natural  evolution  of 
Catholicism  in  Spain. 

In  France  the  position  of  affairs  was  very 
different.  Neither  the  Arabian  civilisation  nor 
the  discovery  of  America  had  any  appreciable 
effect  upon  the  history  of  the  Renaissance  in 
France,  and  yet  for  two  reasons  France  was 
unable  to  work  out  for  herself  the  natural 
evolution  of  her  Catholicism.  With  the  begin- 
ning of  the  Renaissance  civilisation  France 
became  more  open  to  constant  intercourse  with 
Italy  on  account  of  the  increased  intellectual 
activity  of  the  Italians.  Italy,  as  we  have 
seen,  was  in  a  more  advanced  stage  of  culture 
than  France.  Thus  France,  under  Italian 
influence,  seems  to  have  entered  upon  her 
civilisation  before  she  was  really  ready  for  it. 
Secondly,  the  Catholic  civilisation  in  France 


144         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

was  distorted  by  Huguenot  ideas,  which  owed 
their  origin  to  the  teachings  of  Swiss  and 
Teutonic  reformers  :  the  effects  of  these  teach- 
ings upon  European  civilisation  will  be  dis- 
cussed more  conveniently  in  our  later 
consideration  of  the  Protestant  civilisation. 

It  remains,  then,  for  us  to  deal  with  the 
English  Renaissance  civilisation.  England 
held  a  unique  position  in  the  religious  history 
of  Europe.  She  was  dominated  entirely  by 
the  Catholic  illusion  until  the  middle  of  the 
fifteenth  century  :  it  was  then  only  that  Protes- 
tantism, which  had  grown  up  elsewhere,  began 
to  influence  the  minds  of  the  mass  of  the 
inhabitants.  Catholicism  already  had  begun  to 
blossom  into  the  gorgeous  flower  of  Eliza- 
bethan intellectuality  before  the  foreign 
Protestantism  had  succeeded  thoroughly  in 
establishing  the  chilling  effects  of  its  new 
illusion. 

Clearly  we  are  justified  in  looking  upon  the 
Elizabethan  age  of  genius  as  the  outcome  of 
Catholicism  rather  than  as  the  immediate  result 
of  the  new  Protestantism.  The  time  was  too 
short  between  the  introduction  of  Protestantism 
into  England  and  the  greatest  period  of  the 
Elizabethan  drama.  The  increase  of  English 
intellectuality  was  entirely  on  a  level  with  rhe 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       145 

Italian  outburst  of  artistic  activity  :  the  fact 
that  the  English  Renaissance  was  later  in  time 
than  the  Italian  does  not  invalidate  the  truth 
of  this  ;  for  evolution,  working  upon  different 
material,  even  though  working  with  the  same 
instrument,  could  not  produce  contempora- 
neous results.  The  analogy  of  other  countries 
shows  us  that  the  Catholic  civilisation  tended 
to  be  later  elsewhere  than  in  Italy. 

Lastly,  we  have  a  very  different  argument 
leading  to  the  same  conclusion  in  the  internal 
form  of  the  Elizabethan  civilisation.  For  it 
was  an  artistic  civilisation,  and  that,  as  we 
have  seen,  was  the  form  of  civilisation  that  we 
might  expect  to  rise  out  of  the  animistic  illu- 
sion of  Catholic  saint -worship  :  it  is  not  the 
form  that  we  might  expect  to  rise  out  of  a 
monotheistic  Protestantism.  Contemporary 
Protestant  thought,  in  fact,  positively  was 
opposed  to  dramatic  art,  which,  as  we  know, 
was  eclipsed  entirely  under  the  Puritan  rule 
of  Cromwell.  It  is  necessary  to  lay  much 
stress  upon  this  Catholic  origin  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan civilisation,  because  it  is  only  if  we 
accept  that  fact  in  all  its  bearings  that  we  are 
able  to  understand  why  it  was  that  after  the 
Elizabethan  period  we  find  that  comparative 

dearth  of  genius   in   England  until  we   reach 

10 


146         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

the  nineteenth  century  —  we  may  look  upon 
Milton  (1608-74)  as  the  last  great  genius  of 
the  period  of  the  Renaissance  in  England. 

It  follows  naturally  from  the  theory  here 
adumbrated  that  the  Catholic  civilisation 
should  be  succeeded  by  a  period  of  decadence 
that  synchronised  with  the  disillusion  of 
Catholicism,  or  at  any  rate  was  closely  subse- 
quent to  the  increase  of  that  disillusion.  But 
the  new  factor  of  Protestantism  introduced  an 
abnormality  into  the  natural  evolution  of 
rational  disillusion  in  England.  Politically  it 
brought  about  the  civil  war,  with  its  temporary 
triumph  of  Puritanism. 

But  with  the  return  of  the  Stuarts  under 
Charles  II  we  go  back  to  the  more  normal 
spread  of  decadence  ;  but  with  a  difference. 
For  Protestantism  all  the  time  was  growing  up 
within  the  decadence  of  the  Catholic  civilisa- 
tion, much  in  the  same  way  that  Christianity 
had  grown  up  within  the  decadence  of 
Olympianism.  But  Protestantism  grew  more 
easily  than  its  analogue,  because  ultimately  it 
was  based  in  Christianity  upon  the  same 
psychic  illusion  as  Catholicism  :  also  because 
in  England  it  received  continual  support  and 
encouragement  from  the  Protestantism  of 
Central  Europe,  where  Protestantism  reached 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       147 

an  earlier  maturity  than  in  England.  But  for 
the  moment  let  us  consider  rather  the  advance 
of  the  decadence  of  the  Catholic  civilisation 
in  England. 

To  isolate  the  two  contemporaneous  move- 
ments of  decadence  a,nd  growth  is  a  problem 
of  considerable  difficulty.  What  must  now  be 
said  on  the  decadence  of  English  civilisation 
during  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries 
will  not  be  endorsed  readily  by  many  readers. 
Nevertheless  it  is  suggested  that  it  is  the  true 
reading  of  the  evolution  of  civilisation  in 
England. 

The  Elizabethan  civilisation  won  its  chief 
glories  in  the  field  of  poetic  literature,  and  it  is 
in  the  field  of  literature  that  we  are  able  most 
easily  to  find  the  chief  signs  of  decadence. 
A  decadent  literature  seems  to  be  marked  by 
two  special  characteristics— an  attention  to  strict 
rules  of  versification  and  an  encyclopaedic  and 
critical  display  of  the  knowledge  that  comes 
from  much  reading.  In  the  period  under  con- 
sideration we  find  two  men  in  England  who, 
while  they  are  leading  lights  in  literature,  to  a 
remarkable  extent  show  these  special  charac- 
teristics, namely  Pope  and  Johnson,  neither  of 
whom  are  usually  classed  as  decadent.  The 
word  "  decadent "  is  used  here  as  implying  a 


148         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

waning  period  of  intellectuality  rather  than  with 
the  second  intention  of  almost  efTeminate  weak- 
ness which  we  have  come  to  read  into  the 
term. 

Pope,  says  Craik,  had  "  talent  enough  for 
anything."  That  is  true;  he  had  talent,  but 
none  of  the  Elizabethan  creative  genius.  He 
is  a  self-conscious  poet,  an  artificial  poet,  and 
in  this  he  is  a  son  of  the  age  in  which  he  wrote, 
and  in  this  he  shows  that  it  was  a  decadent  age. 
He  has  a  delicacy  of  touch,  which,  by  its  gem- 
like  precision,  adds  a  brilliance  to  his  satire  ; 
he  reminds  one  of  Persius  in  the  Greco -Roman 
decadence,  and,  of  course,  it  is  well  known 
that  his  versification  loses  strength  by  its  very 
want  of  laxity  and  freedom. 

Johnson  is  the  second  figure  of  the  period 
for  whom  it  is  claimed  that  he  has  the  char- 
acteristics of  a  writer  of  a  decadence.  He 
reminds  one  of  the  Alexandrian  writings  of  the 
Hellenic  decadence.  His  literary  knowledge  is 
encyclopaedic,  his  critical  penetration  remark- 
able, his  style  ponderous  and  wanting  in  the 
spontaneity  that  marks  the  period  of  increasing 
vigour. 

Pope  and  Johnson  do  not  stand  alone  :  in 
Collins  and  Gray,  in  Addison  and  Steele  we 
find  the  same  traits.  Even  the  earlier  Dryden 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       149 

lacks  the  exuberance  of  Elizabethanism.  All 
these  writers  show  us  in  every  line  that  they 
lived  in  a  period  of  decadence. 

This  is  more  clearly  marked  in  literature 
and  art  than  in  politics  and  war,  and  this 
apparent  result  arises  from  the  fact  that  de- 
cadence was  on  the  whole  the  widespread 
feature  of  European  civilisation  at  this  period. 
It  is  the  natural  and  obvious  result  of  the  un- 
doubted glories  of  the  Catholic  civilisation  of 
the  Renaissance.  Such  a  decadence  was 
exactly  what  a  priori  we  would  expect  to  find. 
The  mutual  relations  of  the  various  European 
States,  however,  add  complexity  to  the 
problem,  and  make  it  difficult  to  grasp  the 
fact,  because  we  are  led  inevitably  to  contrast 
the  various  achievements  of  the  different 
nations,  and  to  suppose  that,  when  one  is 
superior  to  another,  it  owes  its  superiority  to 
some  inherent  principle  of  growth.  But  this  is 
surely  not  true  :  any  apparent  superiority  may 
show  only  that  in  this  particular  region  de- 
cadence in  this  particular  quality  has  been 
proceeding  less  swiftly  than  elsewhere,  so  that 
the  lesser  decadence  is  in  a  higher  position 
relatively  to  that  of  the  neighbouring  civilisa- 
tion, although  it  is  really  in  a  lower  position 
relatively  to  its  own  former  state  of  culture. 


150         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Maryborough  thus,  it  seems,  won  Blenheim, 
not  because  his  army  was  equal  or  superior  to 
the  Elizabethan  material  which  defeated  the 
Spanish  Armada,  but  because  in  military 
matters  France  under  Louis  XIV  was  more 
decadent  than  England. 

At  the  same  time,  there  was  the  second  factor 
rising  through  the  decadence  of  Europe  in  the 
Protestant  religion,  and  this  we  must  now  con- 
sider. 

Protestantism  was  practically  a  new  religion, 
giving  a  new  form  of  psychic  illusion  to  the 
world.  For  the  core  of  the  later  mediaeval 
Catholicism  was  the  psychic  illusion  of  saint- 
worship,  while  the  core  of  Protestantism  was 
the  psychic  illusion  of  an  immanent  indivi- 
dualised Christ.  The  Catholic  believer  of  the 
later  Middle  Ages  approached  his  deity 
through  the  intermediary  saints,  who  soon 
came  to  form  a  polytheistic  hierarchy  in  prac- 
tical independence  of  the  faintly  imagined 
supreme  deity.  Protestantism,  on  the  other 
hand,  taught  a  pure  monotheism. 

This  appears  to  be  the  essential  distinction 
between  these  two  forms  of  Christianity  from 
the  evolutionary  point  of  view.  It  works  out 
in  the  resultant  civilisations  exractly  as  we  might 
have  anticipated.  The  Catholic  civilisation, 


THE   CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       151 

being  polytheistic,  gave  the  world  the  artistic 
and  literary  glories  of  the  Renaissance  :  the 
Protestant  civilisation,  being  monotheistic,  gave 
the  world  the  inartistic,  scientific,  mechanical, 
wonders  of  the  Victorian  era  :  the  nineteenth 
century  is  ever  memorable  for  the  theoretical 
science  that  centres  round  the  name  of  Darwin, 
and  for  the  mechanical  science  that  surrounds 
us  to-day  on  every  side.  These  are  the  glories 
of  the  Protestant  civilisation. 

The  decadence  of  Catholicism  and  the 
younger  growth  of  Protestantism  have  affected 
one  another  mutually,  so  that  it  is  impossible 
for  us,  who  are  so  close  to  these  movements, 
to  distinguish  clearly  between  them.  Lapse 
of  time  is  necessary  for  the  appreciation  of  the 
main  currents. 

We  may  put  down  the  partial  rejuvenation  of 
Catholicism  in  the  Oxford  Movement  as  an 
interesting  sign  of  the  reaction  of  Catholicism 
upon  Protestantism.  This  reaction  has,  also, 
given  us  the  art  of  the  latter  decades  of  the 
nineteenth  century  :  although  here  we  ought 
not  to  neglect  the  important  factor  of  the 
growth  of  intellectuality,  which  was  a  neces- 
sary concomitant  of  the  scientific  bias  of  the 
Protestant  civilisation. 

The  mechanical   science,   due  ultimately  to 


152         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

the  Protestant  psychic  illusion,  has  had  a  most 
important  secondary  effect  as  applied  to  loco- 
motion ;  for  the  increased  facility  of  communi- 
cation has  led  to  an  extraordinary  diffusion  of 
the  scientific  and  mechanical  results  of  the 
Protestant  illusion  throughout  the  whole  world. 

But  the  mutual  reactions  of  the  forces  that 
are  moving  the  various  communities  form  too 
complex  a  problem  to  be  grasped  by  the  mind 
of  us  who  live  in  the  throes  of  these  reactions. 
It  is  very  difficult  for  men  who  are  contem- 
poraneous with  such  movements  to  grasp  with 
any  certainty  their  bearings  in  detail.  In  the 
conclusion  to  this  volume  an  attempt  is  made 
to  form  some  idea  of  the  larger  forces  at  work 
among  us  in  a  generalised  form. 

But  here  we  ought  to  note  the  effects  of  the 
reaction  of  Protestantism  upon  Catholicism— 
the  "  Catholic  Reaction  "  Symonds  calls  it  in 
his  history  of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy. 

This  reaction  affected  England  very  slightly 
because  with  us  Catholicism  was  stamped  out 
as  a  political  factor  in  the  latter  half  of  the 
seventeenth  century. 

In  Italy,  France,  and  Spain  the  case  was 
very  different.  There  the  declining  Catholi- 
cism was  still  strong  enough  to  crush  Protes- 
tantism, and  then  proceed  upon  its  natural 


THE  CHRISTIAN  CIVILISATIONS       153 

course  of  decadence,  which  thus  became  the 
dominant  factor  of  their  histories  throughout 
the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries.  In 
Italy  this  decadence  was  unbroken  until  the 
latter  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when  the 
reaction  of  Protestant  thought,  along  with 
the  mechanical  diffusion  of  Protestant  intel- 
lectuality, produced  the  movement  that  resulted 
in  the  formation  of  the  modern  kingdom  of 
Italy. 

In  Spain  the  reaction  is  less  distinct,  perhaps 
it  is  still  to  come.  But  the  colonisation  of 
Spanish  America  may  have  taken  the  place  of 
the  result  of  a  simpler  reaction. 

In  France  affairs  were  much  complicated  by 
the  presence  of  the  Huguenots.  Although 
Catholic  decadence  won  the  day,  Protestant 
intellectuality  was  a  constant  disturbing  factor 
in  the  progress  of  French  decadence  during 
the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries — how 
thoroughly  decadent  are  the  Encyclopaedists  ! 
At  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  dis- 
torted reaction  produced  the  Revolution  and 
the  military  triumphs  which  surround  the  name 
of  Napoleon. 

It  appears  that  the  reaction  of  Protestantism 
upon  Catholicism  is  a  sufficient  explanation  of 
the  main  forces  at  work  on  the  Continent  of 


154         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Europe  at  this  period.  But  we  must  remember 
that  such  judgments  are  entirely  ex  post  facto. 
We  can  only  read  into  events  the  theory  which 
we  wish  to  find  therein.  Such  judgment  gains 
power  simply  from  the  concurrence  of  events. 
The  events  of  modern  history  appear  to  concur 
sufficiently  to  make  this  theory  of  the  religious 
causes  of  civilisation  at  any  rate  probable. 


PART   11 


CHAPTER    I 
ANCIENT    EGYPT 

THE  most  distinctive  feature  in  the  great 
change  from  Olympianism  to  Christianity  in 
Europe  was  the  introduction  of  a  general  faith 
in  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  This  change 
must  have  had  a  wonderful  effect  upon  the 
conduct  of  every  individual  who  accepted  the 
new  belief  without  reserve  ;  and  in  a  wider 
sense  the  universal  acceptance  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  continuance  of  life  after  death  must 
have  had  a  similarly  great  effect  upon  the  de- 
velopment of  the  community — that  is,  upon 
the  resultant  civilisation.  It  is  therefore  of 
peculiar  interest  to  the  student  of  the  evolution 
of  civilisation  to  note  to  what  extent  similar 
psychic  illusions  have  held  sway  in  the  minds 
of  men  who  composed  other  and  earlier 
communities  that  are  remarkable  for  their 
independent  development  of  civilisation. 

As  we  look  back  through  the  history  of  man- 

157 


158         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

kind,  we  may  observe  that  there  is  one 
civilisation  which  stands  out  at  once  as  of 
pre-eminent  interest  in  this  connection— the 
civilisation  of  Ancient  Egypt.  It  is  true  that 
we  are  hardly  justified  in  speaking  of  the 
ancient  Egyptian  religion  as  if  it  were  a  simple 
and  complete  identity.  Learned  Egyptolo- 
gists— especially  Professor  Flinders  Petrie— 
have  pointed  out  that  various  distinct  factors 
can  be  traced  in  the  formation  of  that  com- 
posite and  long-lived  group  of  faiths  which 
we,  looking  back  over  a  great  lapse  of  time, 
conveniently  can  unite  under  the  facile  phrase 
of  "  Egyptian  religion."  Indeed,  it  would  be 
extraordinary  if  exactly  the  same  form  of 
faith  were  found  to  be  flourishing  under  the 
Ptolemies  that  had  flourished  thousands  of 
years  earlier  under  the  first  dynasties.  There 
was  change,  progress,  and  decay  in  Egypt  as 
elsewhere.  But  there  is  one  particularity  of 
faith,  one  form  of  psychic  illusion  that  stands 
out  with  such  remarkable  prominence  through- 
out the  long  space  of  Egyptian  history  that, 
in  a  sense,  it  makes  it  allowable  for  us  to 
treat  Egyptian  religion  as  a  simple  unity  :  and 
that  is  faith  in  the  continuity  of  life  after 
death.  "The  Egyptian  regarded  a  continuity 
of  life  as  so  assured  that  it  did  not  make 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  159 

much  break  in  the  life  for  it  to  be  transferred 
from  one  state  to  the  other  "  (W .  Flinders 
Petrie:  Religion  and  Conscience  in  Ancient 

Egypt)- 

For  us  the  deity  round  whom  the  elaborate 
system  of  Egyptian  faith  in  immortality 
especially  centres  is  Osiris.  The  Egyptolo- 
gists have  formed  ingenious  and  convincing 
theories  about  the  earliest  steps  by  which 
Osirian  worship  came  to  be  one  of  the  leading 
characteristics  of  Egyptian  civilisation— how 
the  Osiris  worshippers  were  attacked  by  the 
Asiatic  Set  worshippers ;  how  after  defeat 
they  sought  the  alliance  of  the  Isis  worshippers 
of  the  Delta,  and  were  thus  re-established  in 
power,  until  the  Asiatics  returned  in  force  and 
"  killed  Osiris  " ;  how,  ultimately,  with  the 
assistance  of  the  Horus  worshippers,  the  Set 
worshippers  finally  were  expelled,  and  the 
wonderful  triad,  Osiris,  Isis,  and  Horus,  came 
to  dominate  the  whole  valley  of  the  Nile. 

But  here  we  are  not  concerned  with  these 
interesting  historical  facts  or  hypotheses  ;  we 
are  not  concerned  with  the  coming  of  the 
Osirian  religion  into  its  position  of  superiority 
in  Egypt.  We  have  to  deal  rather  with  the 
civilising  effects  of  this  religion  after  its 
due  establishment  in  the  Nile  valley.  From 


160         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

this  point  of  view  there  is  interest  attached 
to  all  the  three  deities  that  have  been  men- 
tioned. 

Let  us  first  consider  the  kingdom  of 
Osiris.  "This  was  a  counterpart  of  the 
earthly  life,  but  was  reserved  for  the  worthy  " 
(W.  Flinders  Petrie:  Religion  and  Conscience, 
chap.  iii.).  This  sentence  contains  two  state- 
ments that  give  us  the  key,  as  it  seems,  to  a 
true  understanding  of  the  reasons  why  the 
Osirian  faith  was  a  civilising  faith — was,  in 
fact,  a  cause  of  civilisation  in  Egypt.  This 
belief,  at  any  rate  in  its  main  outline,  corre- 
sponds to  the  Christian  faith  in  a  future  life, 
dependent  in  its  nature  upon  the  earthly 
behaviour  of  the  believer.  It  is  hardly  neces- 
sary to  point  out  once  more  the  civilising  effects 
which  such  a  belief  must  have  had  upon  the 
conduct  of  those  who  accepted  the  illusion, 
driving  them  to  act  otherwise  than  under  the 
impulse  of  mere  physical  appetite. 

But  there  are  points  that  distinguish  these 
Osirian  judgments  and  rewards  very  clearly 
from  the  Christian  judgments  and  rewards. 
The  Osirian  standard  of  virtuous  behaviour  was 
not  so  lofty  as  the  Christian  standard.  The 
Egyptian  had  merely  to  protest  his  innocence 
of  forty-two  quite  ordinary  sins.  It  was  an 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  161 

examination  which  an  ordinary  English  gentle- 
man would  have  passed  without  special  pre- 
paration. Now  this  is  a  very  noticeable  point 
of  difference  ;  for  the  Egyptian  was  not  called 
upon  by  the  Osirian  faith  to  aim  at  impossible 
ideas,  to  strive  always  to  follow  "  counsels  of 
perfection  "  with  such  closeness  as  was,  or  was 
not,  inconsistent  with  human  nature.  There- 
fore the  Osirian  illusion  was  not  leading  men 
continually  towards  higher  levels  of  ideal  con- 
duct. It  was  content,  having  taken  men  a 
certain  way  up  the  hill,  to  prevent  them  slipping 
down  again.  That  appears  to  be  the  chief 
reason  why  the  Osirian  faith  failed  to  give 
Egypt  the  highest  fruits  of  civilisation. 

There  were,  of  course,  other  reasons,  and  we 
may  note  some  of  them  here.  The  Osirian  faith 
was  not  working  upon  such  excellent  material 
as  Olympianism  had  extended  throughout  the 
Roman  empire.  The  beginnings  of  Osirian  - 
ism,  indeed,  are  lost  in  a  prehistoric  antiquity  ; 
but  certainly  there  can  never  have  been  in 
Egypt  in  prehistoric  times  any  civilisation  at 
all  comparable  to  the  Olympian  civilisation, 
and  it  is  just  because  Christianity  was  able 
to  work  upon  brain -material  which  contained 
within  itself,  through  Olympianism,  the  poten- 
tiality of  a  fuller,  richer  growth,  that  we  are 

11 


162         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

living  to-day  in  our  own  unparalleled  civili- 
sation. Osirianism,  in  addition  to  the  more 
lowly  level  of  the  Osirian  standard,  had  to 
work  upon  material  that  did  not  contain,  in 
the  inherited  effect  of  a  previous  period  of 
civilisation,  the  potentiality  of  an  exceptionally 
luxuriant  growth. 

Also  the  peculiarly  composite  nature  of 
Egyptian  theology  was  never  crushed  quite 
out  of  sight,  and  this,  too,  interfered  with  the 
civilising  effects  of  Osirianism.  It  is  true  that 
the  marriage  of  Osiris  and  Isis  and  their 
parentage  of  Horus  became  a  part  of  the 
generally  accepted  Egyptian  creed.  But  Ra, 
the  cosmic  sun -god,  was  never  fitted  satisfac- 
torily into  the  Osirian  system— indeed,  the 
worship  of  Ra  outshone  all  others  in  the  nine- 
teenth dynasty.  This  composite  formation 
opposed  itself  continually  to  the  development 
of  any  such  Osirian  monotheism  as  would  have 
satisfied  temporarily  the  philosophic  theorising 
that  so  readily  accompanies  disillusion. 

Isis,  by  reason  of  her  sex,  was  united  easily 
to  the  Osirian  system,  both  as  wife  and  sister 
to  Osiris  ;  but  she  did  not  lose  her  independent 
importance  on  this  account.  On  the  contrary, 
in  the  comparatively  modern  times  after  the 
twenty-sixth  dynasty,  she  became  the  leading 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  163 

deity  of  Egypt,  dwarfing  even  Osiris,  much 
in  the  same  way  that  the  Madonna  of  the 
later  Middle  Ages— whose  identity  with  Isis  is 
hardly  to  be  denied — became  for  a  time  the 
leading  deity  of  Christendom. 

The  fact  that  Isis  and  Madonna  have  held 
positions  of  such  commanding  distinction  in 
Egypt  and  in  Christendom  points  to  a  great 
evolutionary  importance  attached  to  the  idea 
of  a  mother-goddess  ;  for  it  is  inconceivable 
that  without  this  importance  the  psychic  illu- 
sion in  such  a  deity  as  Isis  could  have  come 
to  dominate  the  minds  of  men  through  such 
protracted  periods  of  time.  The  illusion  of 
a  mother-goddess,  indeed,  has  been  evolved, 
both  in  Egypt  and  in  Italy,  into  such  promi- 
nence that,  if  we  regard  civilisation  as  the 
object  for  the  establishment  of  which,  through 
psychic  illusion,  religion  exists,  we  must  look 
upon  this  particular  illusion  as  a  very  influen- 
tial factor  in  the  evolution  of  civilisation. 

We  in  the  twentieth  century  are  apt  to 
look  upon  the  ideal  maternity  of  Isis— or  of 
Madonna — as  a  poetic  or  artistic  sublimation 
of  a  most  holy  beauty — most  holy,  not  because 
of  faith  in  the  legendary  details  of  myth  but, 
as  we  suppose,  in  a  more  scientific  or  more 
philosophic  sense.  It  would  be  pleasant  to 


164         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

think  that  it  was  for  some  such  aesthetic 
purpose  that  the  Isidian  illusion  was  evolved. 
Indeed,  possibly  such  a  hypothesis  could  be 
maintained  with  some  not  unconvincing  argu- 
mentative support.  The  aesthetic  side  of  life 
is  too  real  historically  to  be  of  quite  trivial 
import  in  the  evolution  of  civilisation.  The 
production  of  the  more  peaceful  characteristics 
of  artistic  pre-eminence,  the  cultivation  of  those 
more  peaceful  virtues  that  seem  to  be  the  proper 
accompaniment  of  aesthetic  excellence,  are  as 
much  the  outcome  of  evolution  as  the  more 
obvious  martial  virtues  which  we  can  see  so 
clearly  have  come  into  prominent  existence  in 
order  to  lead  the  community  into  the  desirable 
condition  of  material  security  or  hegemony ; 
but  we  need  not  attempt  to  uphold  any  such 
paradoxical  thesis— as  if  Isis  and  Horus  were 
evolved  in  order  that  Botticelli  and  Raphael 
might  paint  masterpieces — and  that  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  the  characters  of  the  ancient 
Egyptians  and  of  the  Italians  of  the  fifteenth 
century  are  by  no  means  improbable  resultants 
from  such  a  form  of  evolution.  With  regard 
to  the  latter  point,  reference  might  be  made 
to  the  mild  and  bloodless  character  of  the 
Italian  wars  in  the  period  preceding  the  in- 
vading expedition  of  Charles  VIII  (Symonds: 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  165 

Sketches   and   Studies   in   Italy   and    Greece: 
Fornovo). 

But  it  is  safer  to  look  upon  this  motive  of 
the  causes  of  the  development  of  the  Isidian 
worship  and  the  Madonna  cult  as  merely  sub- 
sidiary to  a  simpler  but,  in  fact,  deeper  reason, 
which  is  more  in  consonance  with  the  ordinary 
principles  of  biological  evolution— through 
natural  selection,  we  may  say  almost,  rather 
than  sexual  selection.  For  it  seems  that  Isidian 
worship — throughout  the  remainder  of  this 
passage  the  worship  of  I  sis  is  coupled  with  the 
Catholic  cult  of  the  Madonna — rose  to  promi- 
nence because  of  the  transcendent  importance 
to  the  evolution  of  civilisation  of  the  devoted 
love  of  the  mother  towards  her  child. 

It  is  in  the  almost  commonplace  truism  that 
the  mother  loves  her  child  that  Isidian  worship 
appears  to  have  all  its  meaning.  The  worship 
was  evolved  in  order  that  the  natural  mother- 
love  might  find  a  psychic  glorification,  which 
would  tend  to  intensify  it  beyond  that  natural 
point  in  which  the  human  animal  is  not  so 
very  strongly  contrasted  with  the  lower 
animals.  We  can  see  with  facility  how  the 
courage  of  the  timorous  hen  had  to  evolve 
itself,  so  to  speak,  into  existence  for  the  pro- 
tection of  the  chickens,  who  might  not  have 


166         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

survived  without  it  to  propagate  their  kind  ; 
and  similar  courage  was  evolved,  no  doubt,  in 
a  similar  way  in  the  human  mother.  But  such 
courageous  love  was  not  all  that  was  desirable 
in  her  who  was  to  be  the  mother  of  civilised 
man,  ancestress  of  a  civilised  race  ;  more  than 
that  was  desirable  :  for  the  sake  of  this  further 
desirability  Isidian  worship  was  evolved,  so  that 
the  human  mother  might  come  to  realise  the 
dignity  that  was  put  upon  her  in  becoming 
the  mother  of  a  man-child,  even  as  I  sis  had 
become  the  mother  of  Horus.  It  was  a  psychic 
illusion,  no  doubt,  this  divine  exemplar  of 
motherhood.  It  is  still  a  psychic  illusion  to- 
day, an  illusion  that  we  cherish,  every  mother's 
son  of  us,  in  our  hearts,  whether  we  seek  to 
find  an  explanation  of  it  in  science,  or 
in  religion,  or  in  the  mere  fact  that  we  share 
still  the  Isidian  illusion  of  our  day. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  see  that  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  civilisation  the  educational  potentiali- 
ties of  maternal  love  might  be  worth 
intensification.  It  was  not  simply  that  the 
love  might  be  extended  over  a  longer  period 
of  time,  and  so  afford  ampler  physical  pro- 
tection to  the  offspring  up  to  a  later  period 
of  life  ;  it  was  rather  that  the  mother  might 
be  influenced  by  the  psychic  illusion  of  an 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  167 

heavenly  example  to  seize  the  endless  oppor- 
tunities offered  by  the  chances  of  daily  life  to 
train  her  child  according  to  the  example  of 
the  divine  Horus. 

There  is  something  very  modern  in  this  un- 
conscious Egyptian  idea  of  the  supreme  racial 
importance  of  the  boy.  But  with  us  in  the 
twentieth  century,  for  whom  post-Darwinian 
theories  have  become  the  commonplace  basis 
of  all  philosophic  thought,  the  idea  is  con- 
scious, scientific,  sociological  ;  for  them  the 
idea  was  based  upon  psychic  illusion  entirely, 
for  it  was  only  through  psychic  illusion  that 
the  utterly  unscientific  Egyptian  mother  could 
be  induced  consistently  to  act  in  accordance 
with  the  principles  of  evolutionary  progress — 
principles  which,  through  the  teachings  of  our 
men  of  science,  we  are  coming  slowly  to  recog- 
nise as  essential  to  the  advance  of  a  com- 
munity that  seeks  for  the  highest  civilisation. 
For,  indeed,  if  the  principle  is  true,  the  detec- 
tion of  it  does  not  make  any  difference  to 
its  truth  one  way  or  the  other.  The  laws  of 
Nature  are  eternal,  but  their  codification  is 
trivial,  accidental.  It  is  the  old  Greek  notion 
of  Plato  of  the  eternity,  the  reality,  of  the 
"  idea,"  as  opposed  to  the  unreality,  the 
transience,  of  the  particular. 


168         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Applying  this  to  the  Isidian  worship  of  the 
mother-goddess,  we  may  see  that  the  "  idea  " 
of  the  perfect  motherhood  and  perfected  son- 
ship  of  Isis  and  Horus,  of  Madonna  and  II 
Santissimo  Bambino  transcends  all  particu- 
larities of  local  and  temporal  worship,  and, 
indeed,  is  immanent  in  the  scheme  of  the  evolu- 
tion of  civilised  man.  But  it  is  the  particu- 
larity, and  not  the  universal  law,  which  always 
has  remained  as  the  factor  which  touched  the 
individual.  It  is  through  the  individual  that 
evolution  has  to  work,  and,  therefore,  it  is  the 
particular  motive  consonant  with  the  greater 
universality  that  has  to  be  evolved  in  order 
to  make  the  individual  act  in  consonance  with 
the  universal  law.  There  is  no  need  for  the 
individual  to  realise  that  his  actions  are  in 
accordance  with  any  great  scheme  in  order 
that  they  may  be  the  suitable  actions  to  accord 
with  the  scheme.  The  essential  point  is  the 
existence  of  the  particular  motive  which  may 
induce  him  to  perform  the  particular  evolu- 
tionarily  desirable  act.  It  is  just  the  pro- 
duction of  this  motive  which  evolution  is  able 
to  bring  about ;  and  evolution  therefore  de- 
velops that  psychic  illusion  which  can  supply 
the  motive.  In  this  way  and  for  this  reason 
was  evolved  the  psychic  illusion  in  the  divinity 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  169 

of  Isis,  in  order  that  the  mothers  of  Egypt— 
and  ultimately  the  mothers  of  Europe— might 
be  swayed  by  the  illusion  towards  behaviour  to 
their  offspring  that  was  in  accordance  with  the 
training  of  the  young  in  the  way  of  civilisation. 
The  importance  evolutionary  of  this  Isidian 
illusion  is  shown  a  posteriori  by  its  remarkable 
historical  persistence.  It  is  true  that  in  the 
earliest  periods  of  Egyptian  civilisation  Isis  did 
not  occupy  the  pre-eminent  position  which  she 
came  to  fill  finally  in  the  twenty-sixth  dynasty  ; 
but  still  from  a  very  early  date  she  occupied  a 
position  of  some  apparent  importance  in 
the  somewhat  crowded  ranks  of  Egyptian 
theology  ;  and  after  the  Roman  occupation  of 
Egypt  her  worship  spread  far  beyond  the  boun- 
daries of  Egypt  ;  from  then  right  down  to  the 
present  time  "  after  a  change  of  name  due 
to  the  growth  of  Christianity  she  has  continued 
to  receive  the  adoration  of  a  large  part  of 
Europe  "  (Flinders  Petrie :  Religion  of  Ancient 
Egypt,  chap.  vi.).  Except  in  the  rather  sophis- 
ticated unity  wherein  the  identity  of  the  same 
supreme  deity  is  postulated  as  underlying  many 
varieties  of  monotheism,  there  is  no  form  of 
psychic  illusion  which  has  dominated  the 
human  mind  through  such  an  enormous  tract 
of  relatively  high  civilisation.  That  some  con- 


170         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

nection  exists  between  this  civilisation  and  Isis- 
worship  is  self-evident ;  for  the  notion  that  the 
combination  is  fortuitous  would  be  absurd.  The 
point  to  be  considered  is,  not  the  existence  of 
the  connection  but  the  rational  explanation  of 
it.  It  appears  clear  enough  that  the  connec- 
tion is  causative,  that  the  psychic  illusion  pre- 
ceded and  produced  the  civilisation— or  rather 
produced  a  part  of  the  civilisation,  while  other 
illusions  were  engaged  similarly  in  producing 
the  other  parts. 

In  discussing  the  meaning  of  the  worship  of 
Isis  frequent  mention  has  been  made  of  Horus. 
There  are  a  few  points  in  connection  with  him 
which  are  worthy  of  separate  consideration 
from  our  point  of  view.  He  has,  indeed,  a 
remarkably  complex  history.  Originally  Horus 
was  not  the  son  of  Isis,  but  as  old  a  deity  as 
Isis  herself.  He  was  a  sun -god,  and  prob- 
ably was  the  local  divinity  of  a  tribe  inhabiting 
the  district  round  Letopolis.  Also  there  seems 
to  have  been  another  hawk-god  of  the  same 
name  at  Edfu.  These  two  became  identified, 
and  the  combined  Horus  was  worshipped  co- 
equally  with  Set,  the  Oriental  god  of  yet 
another  community.  But  when,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  Osiris  worshippers,  with  whom  the 
Set  worshippers  were  at  feud,  united  with  the 


ANCIENT  EGYFT  171 

worshippers  of  Isis  and  the  worshippers  of 
Horus,  it  became  evolutionary  desirable  to 
amalgamate  Osiris,  Isis,  and  Horus  into  a 
family  in  opposition  to  Set.  Horus,  then,  was 
not  originally  inferior  to  Osiris  and  Isis,  except 
in  so  far  as  the  worshippers  of  Horus  may 
have  been  inferior  to  the  worshippers  of  Osiris 
and  Isis.  This,  therefore,  shows  us  again  how 
important  from  the  evolutionary  point  of  view 
must  have  been  the  establishment  of  the  full 
power  of  the  psychic  illusion  of  Isis  as  the 
mother-goddess ;  for  the  great  Horus  is 
evolved  into  the  figure  of  her  boy -baby,  in 
which  aspect  eventually  he  loses  many  of  his 
original  attributes  as  a  mighty  sun -god. 
Evolution  had  no  need  of  a  second  great 
deity  to  share  the  position  which  Osiris  had 
come  to  occupy,  but  it  had  need  of  a  deity 
that  worthily  would  complete  the  picture  of 
Isis  as  the  mother-goddess.  For  this  reason, 
we  may  conclude,  Horus  became  the  divine 
child  of  Isis.  Really  the  analogy  is  wonder- 
fully close  to  the  evolution  of  Christ,  the 
almighty  God  who  was  crucified  on  Calvary, 
into  the  bambino  of  the  Italian  Madonna.  Un- 
doubtedly the  Egyptian  analogy  must  have 
assisted  largely  the  promulgation  of  the 
Catholic  belief. 


172         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Ra,  the  alternative  cosmogonic  sun -god  who 
has  been  mentioned  above,  having  failed  to 
find  a  place  in  the  antagonistic  Osirian  family, 
after  a  few  temporary  flashes  of  brilliant 
splendour  has  faded  long  since  into  the  dark- 
ness of  oblivion,  except  in  so  far  as  he  has  come 
through  identification  with  Osiris  to  share  in 
his  all-absorbing  monotheistic  unity.  Horus, 
on  the  other  hand,  has  gained  what  promises 
to  be  at  any  rate  a  human  immortality. 

Of  the  many  great  Egyptian  deities  who 
have  not  been  mentioned  in  this  chapter 
perhaps  the  most  prominent  is  Hathor,  who 
is  said  to  be  of  Phoenician  origin,  and  came 
in  the  end  to  be  little  more  than  a  variant 
of  Isis  ;  from  our  point  of  view  there  would 
be  no  need  to  make  any  comment  on  the  wide- 
spread Hathor  worship  ;  for  enough  has  been 
said  above  about  the  mother -goddess  in  the 
consideration  of  the  worship  of  Isis.  But  there 
is  one  point  in  which  Hathor  appears  to  have 
a  remarkable  distinction  of  attribute,  and  that 
is  in  connection  with  mummification  :  "  the  fact 
of  the  Hathor-cow  being  represented  as  gallop- 
ing into  the  unseen  world  bearing  the  mummy 
on  her  back  points  to  the  mummification  being 
part  of  the  religion  of  Hathor."  Whether  this 
conclusion  is  true  historically  or  not,  at  any 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  173 

rate  we  may  consider  the  philosophy  of  mum- 
mification conveniently  under  the  heading  of 
Hathor-worship ;  for  the  custom  of  mummi- 
fication was  as  general  in  Egypt  as  the  cult 
of  Hathor. 

It  is  quite  evident  that  mummification  is  not 
a  necessary  corollary  resulting  from  a  belief 
in  the  immortality  of  the  individual,  for  such 
a  belief  has  been  accepted  by  almost  innumer- 
able communities  who  have  not  practised  any- 
thing approaching  to  mummification.  Flinders 
Petrie  ( Religion  and  Conscience  in  Ancient 
Egypt,  chap,  iii.)  gives,  as  a  statement  of  the 
Egyptian  faith  "  concerning  the  future  state 
of  men,  three  wholly  contradictory  theories  "  ; 
and  he  adds  that  "  it  is  probable  that  the 
mummy  theory  is  a  fourth."  We  are  not  con- 
cerned here  with  the  interesting  historical  dis- 
tinctions between  these  rival  theories  ;  but  with 
regard  to  the  theory  of  mummification  it  is 
to  be  noted  that  this  theory  implies  a  psychic 
illusion  in  the  revivification  of  the  body  ;  and 
this  illusion  was  so  deeply  rooted  in  the 
Egyptian  mind  that  it  must  have  affected  the 
conduct  of  each  man  in  so  far  as  he  believed 
that  the  condition  of  the  revivified  mummy 
depended  on  his  temporal  earthly  conduct. 
Ultimately,  in  Ptolemaic  times,  if  not  earlier, 


174         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

the  mummificatory  theory  came  to  coalesce 
with  the  "  Elysian  "  theory  of  the  worship  of 
Osiris,  to  which  originally  it  stood  in  contra- 
distinction. This  coalescence  of  the  theories 
tended  to  bring  the  mummy  directly  into  the 
moral  weighing  by  Thoth  of  the  immortal  being 
before  Osiris,  and  thus  to  make  the  judgment 
of  Osiris  the  final  criterion  of  the  goodness 
and  badness  of  the  conduct  of  the  individual 
body  while  alive  on  earth.  Consequently 
the  acceptance  of  the  mummificatory  theory 
would  tend  to  bring  about  a  sanctification  of 
the  life  of  the  individual  man  in  accordance 
with  the  principles  of  the  Osirian  standard. 
It  is  interesting  as  pointing  directly  to  the 
Christian  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  the  body. 
But  the  Osirian  standard,  as  has  been  said 
already,  was  not  very  high;  and  that  seems 
to  be  a  reason  why  Osirianism  could  not  pro- 
duce a  very  high  state  of  civilisation.  It  is 
not  unlikely  that  a  more  thorough  coalescence 
of  the  various  opposing  theories  ultimately 
would  have  led  to  the  evolution  of  a  higher 
Osirian  standard  of  conduct,  but  the  political 
ascendancy  of  Rome  in  Egypt,  bringing 
Hellenic  disillusion  in  its  train,  cut  off  the 
possibility  of  independent  Egyptian  develop- 
ment ;  so  that  the  history  of  Egyptian  civilisa- 


ANCIENT  EGYPT  175 

tion  becomes  merged  in  the  history  of 
Olympian  civilisation,  and  the  history  of 
Egyptian  religion  has  such  interest  only  as 
it  gains  from  the  points  which  Christianity 
adopted  from  it. 


CHAPTER    II 
BUDDHISM 

OF  the  personalities  of  the  founders  of  the 
great  religions  of  the  world — Christ,  Confucius, 
Mohammed,  and  the  rest — none  has  a  greater 
charm  than  that  of  Siddattha,  son  of  the  Raja 
of  Kapila-vastu,  called  also  by  his  family  name 
of  Gotama,  whom  all  the  world  knows  as  the 
Buddha.  But,  unfortunately,  here  we  are  not 
concerned  with  his  charming  personality  so 
much  as  with  the  doctrines  and  teachings  that 
have  grown  round  his  name  into  the  religious 
system  of  Buddhism. 

When  first  we  come  to  consider  the  various 
religions  of  the  world,  with  reference  more 
especially  to  the  history  of  the  development  of 
civilisation,  no  point  is  more  disconcerting  than 
the  fact  that  Buddhism  appears  to  fulfil  the 
requirements  that  seem,  according  to  our 
theory,  to  be  necessary  antecedents  of  a  period 
of  high  civilisation  and  high  intellectuality,  and 

178 


BUDDHISM  177 

yet  Buddhism  has  not  led  to  any  such  epoch 
of  brilliant  pre-eminence  in  the  history  of 
mankind. 

Buddhism  has  been  the  accepted  religion 
of  countless  millions  of  men.  It  preaches 
doctrines  that  seem  to  be  imbued  sufficiently 
with  psychic  illusion,  and  yet  the  various  purely 
Buddhistic  civilisations — if  the  term  may  be 
used  in  this  application — are  not  remarkable 
for  any  great  output  of  intellectuality ;  they 
have  not  produced  great  art,  great  literature, 
great  scientific  or  mechanical  achievements. 

If  Buddhism  has  preached  doctrines  which 
fulfil  the  conditions  that  are  said  in  the  pre- 
vious chapters  to  be  the  essential  precursors 
of  civilisation,  and  yet  has  failed  to  produce 
the  effects  which,  according  to  the  theory  of  this 
book,  must  ensue  from  the  widespread  accept- 
ance of  such  doctrines,  our  theory  collapses  ; 
a  single  exception  would  kill  it,  unless  the 
explanation  of  the  exception  can  show  that  it 
is  not  real,  but  merely  apparent. 

Buddhism  is  a  religion  "  the  infallible  diag- 
nostic of  which  is  the  belief  in  the  infinite 
capacity  of  the  human  intellect."  The  Buddha 
is  intelligence  throughout  the  world.  "  As  the 
highest  form  of  intelligence  is  the  perfect 
man,  the  only  object  of  worship  is  the 

12 


178         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

memory  of  the  glorified  Buddha "  (G.  M. 
Grant:  Religions  of  the  World,  chap.  vii.).  It 
is  desirable  for  us  to  notice  carefully  that 
the  pure  Buddhistic  doctrine  teaches  that  the 
Buddha  is  beyond  the  influence  of  prayer. 
Indeed,  Buddhism,  as  has  been  noted  often,  is 
an  atheistic  religion  ;  the  god  of  Buddhism  is 
one  the  non-existence  of  whom,  as  an  enduring 
influential  personality,  it  is  the  essence  of 
Buddhism  to  teach.  The  Buddha,  as  the  per- 
fect man,  reached  Nirvana,  the  negation  of 
existence,  the  position  which,  according  to 
Buddhism,  is  the  goal  at  which  men  ought  to 
aim,  and  which  they  reach  by  perfection. 

The  theory  of  Buddhism,  thus  expressed  in 
almost  paradoxical  absurdity,  seems  to  us  to 
be  lacking  singularly  in  attractiveness  ;  it  has 
had,  indeed,  very  little  hold  upon  the  more 
religious  spirits  of  Europe,  attracting  perhaps 
only  the  atheist  or  the  agnostic,  for  the  psychic 
illusion  of  Buddhism  is  the  converse  of  that 
of  Christianity ;  instead  of  an  active  and  intel- 
ligent deity,  concerned  perpetually  in  all  the 
doings  of  every  man,  we  find  here  a  passive, 
uninterested  nonentity.  Thus  the  psychic  illu- 
sion of  Buddhism  is  concentrated  for  each 
believer  upon  himself. 

This  brings  us  to  the  great  central  doctrine 


BUDDHISM  179 

of  Buddhism,  the  mystery  of  Karma,  by  which, 
through  the  perpetual  cycle  of  cause  and  effect, 
the  life  of  the  individual  eternally  is  reborn  on 
the  death  of  the  body  in  some  new  form  of 
terrestrial  existence :  "  thus  a  man's  social 
position  in  life  and  his  physical  advantages  or 
the  reverse  are  the  result  of  his  actions  in  a 
previous  birth"  (T .  Rhys  Davis:  Early 
Buddhism,  chap.  vi.).  The  life  has  no  exist- 
ence in  separation  from  a  body,  but  it  has  con- 
tinuity of  individual  existence  as  the  active  life 
of  successive  bodies,  until,  through  perfection, 
it  reaches  the  final  goal  of  non-existence  in 
Nirvana. 

Now  here,  we  may  say,  is  psychic  illusion  of 
a  sort,  the  illusion  that  in  some  mysterious  way 
the  life  survives,  as  an  individuality,  the  death 
of  the  body,  and  becomes  the  life  of  some 
other  body,  human  or  animal. 

And  yet,  perhaps,  in  a  more  generous  sense 
it  is  not  illusion  at  all ;  it  is  not  illusion  to  say 
that  the  life  of  an  individual  is  the  resultant  of 
the  previous  lives  of  all  his  progenitors.  That 
is  an  obvious  biological  statement,  obvious  to 
us  modern  men,  but  by  no  means  obvious  to 
Gotama  and  his  contemporaries,  in  whom  the 
quasi-detection  of  this  truth  is  a  most  remark- 
able achievement.  But  there  is  a  flaw  in  the 


180         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

statement,  because  Buddhism  "  represented  the 
action  of  past  lives  on  present  ones — which  is 
a  profound  truth— as  the  action  of  a  past  life 
on  a  present  one  in  a  manner  not  supported 
by  the  facts  of  experience  "  (T '.  Rhys  Davis: 
Early  Buddhism,  chap.  vi.). 

Thus  Gotama  taught  a  psychic  illusion  which 
was  almost  a  psychic  truth.  If  he  had  taught 
the  truth  and  nothing  but  the  truth,  his  teach- 
ing, it  seems,  could  have  had  no  effect  at  all 
upon  the  evolution  of  a  civilisation,  for  his 
literal  disciples  would  have  acted  exactly  in 
rational  accordance  with  natural  biological 
evolution.  Whereas,  in  order  to  produce 
civilisation,  irrational,  unnatural  behaviour  is 
necessary  ;  it  is  this  that  differentiates  the  men 
who  are  in  a  condition  of  becoming  civilised 
from  those  who  are  in  a  condition  of  naturally 
evolved  brutish  barbarism. 

It  would  follow,  then,  from  this  theory  that 
if  the  Buddha  had  taught  a  scientifically  true 
principle  of  conduct,  he  would  have  led  his 
followers  merely  into  a  rank  disillusion  in  the 
ancient  beliefs  of  the  Brahmins,  and  therefore 
would  have  reduced  them  from  such  height 
of  civilisation  as  they  had  reached  already. 
But  Buddhism  did  not  have  this  effect,  partly 
because,  as  we  have  seen,  even  in  its  purest 


BUDDHISM  181 

form  it  did  not  teach  a  doctrine  that  was  free 
altogether  from  error,  partly  because  it  did  not 
retain  for  any  length  of  time  its  purity 
except  among  a  few  individuals  of  exceptional 
intellectual  power.  The  main  reason  why  the 
pure  Buddhistic  doctrine  could  not  be  accepted 
generally  and  unreservedly  has  been  already 
shown  implicitly,  for  the  men  who  accepted 
it  can  have  had  hardly  any  psychic  illusion  to 
differentiate  their  conduct ;  this  will  have 
tended  towards  their  elimination,  and  so  to  the 
elimination  of  their  belief,  by  making  each 
generation  tend  to  occupy  a  lower  plane  than 
the  previous  generation.  We  know  that,  in 
fact,  pure  Buddhism  has  done  nothing  for  the 
world  in  spite  of  its  truth — or  rather,  because 
of  its  truth. 

It  was  thus  inevitable  that  Buddhism  should 
lose  its  purity  ;  it  could  only  live  in  its  primi- 
tive verity  by  contradicting  itself  and  descend- 
ing into  the  various  puerilities  of  modern 
Buddhism  scattered  through  Asia,  which  are 
prevented  from  coming  into  power  by  their 
mutual  divergency,  as  well  as  by  their  inherent 
substratum  of  truth. 

The  doctrine  of  the  continued  existence  of 
the  effects  of  conduct,  which,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  so  very  near  the  scientific  philosophy  of 


182         A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

modern  Europe,,  in  the  primitive  Buddhistic 
teaching  easily  fell  away  into  a  doctrine  of  the 
mechanical  transmigration  of  souls.  Thus  in 
impure  Buddhism,  beyond  the  simpler  illusion 
of  the  continued  existence  of  the  individual 
life,  there  is  the  further,  subtler,  illusion  of  the 
rewards  open  to  the  soul  as  prizes  for  virtuous 
behaviour,  not,  indeed,  offered  by  any  personal 
deity,  but  self -existent,  as  the  effects  of  cause  ; 
the  supreme  reward,  of  course,  is  extinction  in 
Nirvana. 

It  is  difficult  for  us  to  see  that  Buddhism 
by  this  psychic  illusion  has  tended  to  lead  men 
in  the  way  of  such  virtues  as  the  Buddha  had 
preached  by  the  exemplification  of  his  life. 
Monier  Williams  (Buddhism,  p.  551)  gives 
us  a  long  list  of  the  praiseworthy  characteris- 
tics of  Buddhism  in  its  purest  and  highest 
form.  But  the  Buddhistic  virtues  are  just 
those  which  are  of  the  least  communal  advan- 
tage, which  are  in  the  least  degree  altruistic, 
and,  therefore,  they  are  those  virtues  of  which 
evolution  has  been  able  to  make  the  least  use 
in  leading  men  towards  the  goal  of  the  highest 
civilisation.  They  are  individual  virtues,  not 
communal ;  they  are  selfish  virtues,  not  altru- 
istic ;  they  are  interesting  virtues  to  the  man 
who  practises  them,  where— if  we  postulate 


BUDDHISM  183 

civilisation  as  the  goal  at  which  religion  aims 
through  evolution — they  should  be  uninterest- 
ing. Now,  it  is  just  here  that  the  psychic 
illusion  of  Buddhism  appears  to  differ  diametri- 
cally from  the  psychic  illusions  of  Europe, 
amongst  which  Christianity,  of  course,  must 
be  classed  ;  we  have  seen  how  communal  were 
the  psychic  illusions  that  inspired  the  ancient 
Romans  to  their  peculiar  virtues.  Less 
obviously,  but  no  less  actually,  the  Christian 
virtues  are  communal. 

Further,  it  is  open  theoretically  to  a  man  to 
be  a  perfect  Buddhist  in  complete  isolation. 
It  is  not  possible  for  a  man — unless  perhaps 
he  be  already  a  priest — to  be  a  perfect  Catholic 
in  isolation.  Not  only  ideally  but  practically, 
Catholicism  demands  that  a  congregation 
should  be  gathered  together. 

If  we  reflect  upon  this  theoretic  potential 
isolation  of  the  good  Buddhist,  we  can  grasp 
without  much  difficulty  the  reason  of  the  fact 
that  evolution  could  not  extract  from  Buddhism 
the  highest  results  of  civilisation.  Psychic  illu- 
sion is  there,  but  the  wrong  kind  of  psychic 
illusion.  The  birth  of  Buddhistic  civilisation 
is  abortive,  and,  therefore,  incapable  of  the 
highest  development.  It  is  not  because 
Buddhism  holds  out  as  its  highest  award  the 


184         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

extinction  in  Nirvana,  while  Christianity  holds 
out  the  more  alluring  prospect  of  an  eternity 
of  bliss  ;  for  clearly  evolution,  which  has  over- 
come so  many  more  subtle  mental  difficulties, 
could  have  produced  the  belief  that  the  one  is 
as  attractive  a  prospect  as  the  other ;  to  very 
many  extinction  has  been,  and  is,  an  attractive 
prospect ;  it  is  rather  because .  the  virtues 
which  Buddhism  inculcates  are  the  virtues  of 
the  individual,  the  virtues  which  Christianity, 
especially  Catholic  Christianity,  teaches  con- 
sistently are  the  virtues  of  the  group,  of  the 
Church,  and  so,  in  the  universality  of  the 
psychic  illusion,  of  the  community. 

Gotama  did  not  make  it  his  aim  primarily 
to  free  men  from  sin  ;  what  he  desired  rather 
was  to  free  them  from  the  misery  which, 
according  to  him,  was  inherent  in  ignorance  of 
truth.  Therefore  Buddhism  does  not  tend 
initially  to  teach  a  high  moral  code— inci- 
dentally it  has  taught  such  a  code  frequently. 
Where  Christianity  at  its  best — however  far  it 
fell  below  this  Ideal  standard— made  it  almost 
a  point  of  honour  for  the  believer  to  keep  him- 
self as  far  as  possible  worthy  of  his  future  com- 
munion with  his  personal  God,  Buddhism 
made  no  such  appeal,  for  the  motives  of  the 
Buddhist  are  entirely  selfish  ;  his  goal  is  to 


BUDDHISM  185 

obtain  the  blessing  of  Nirvana,  without  refer- 
ence to  any  personal  deity  such  as  that  before 
whose  ideal  purity  the  Christian  believes  that 
he  will  have  to  stand  naked  and  ashamed. 

Indeed,  the  psychic  illusion  of  an  active 
personal  deity  is  inwrought  so  closely  into  our 
European  minds  that  we  have  difficulty  in 
realising  how  a  spiritual  system  worthy  of  the 
name  of  a  religion  can  exist  without  it.  We 
can  realise  an  Irreligious  atheism  easily  enough, 
but  hardly  a  religious  atheism  ;  yet  that  is  the 
anomaly  that  we  find  in  pure  Buddhism. 

Buddhistic  doctrine,  also,  has  encouraged 
the  believer  to  isolate  himself  in  unsocial  medi- 
tation to  an  extent  that  has  prevented  the 
evolution  of  those  social  opinions  by  which 
co-operatively  communal  progress  is  made 
possible.  It  is  true  that  such  meditative  con- 
templation does  not  seem  to  be  alien  to  the 
spirit  of  mediaeval  Catholic  Christianity,  which 
yet  produced  so  glorious  a  civilisation.  But 
in  Christendom  the  meditative  life  was  confined 
in  practice  to  the  priesthood.  In  Buddhist 
countries  there  has  been  no  such  limitation. 
Each  and  every  Buddhist,  in  working  out  his 
ascent  to  Nirvana,  is  guided  by  the  same 
motives  and  rules  of  conduct.  Consequently, 
that  which  in  Christendom  has  been  sporadic 


186         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

has  been  general  in  Buddhist  lands,  and 
has  affected  anti -socially  the  whole  body  of 
believers. 

Individual  progress  towards  civilisation  in 
isolation  is  inconceivable ;  social  progress 
always  must  overlie  the  personal  progress  of 
each  man,  and  social  progress  is  just  that  which 
no  possible  distribution  of  evolutionary  pro- 
ductiveness can  extract  from  pure  and  isolated 
meditation,  however  exalted  may  be  the  intel- 
lectuality involved  in  the  process.  It  is  not 
impossible  that  a  limited  amount  of  the  medi- 
tative spirit  may  be  advantageous  to  a  com- 
munity by  leading  towards  an  increased 
intelligence,  and  also  as  tending  to  strengthen 
psychic  illusions  ;  but  any  general  acceptance 
of  the  meditative  life  as  the  universal  ideal  of 
the  members  of  a  community  must  tend 
towards  an  anti-social  view  of  existence,  which, 
by  weakening  communal  bonds,  will  lead 
actually  to  a  lowering  of  intellectuality. 

Celibacy  has  been  taught  by  Buddhism  as 
the  highest  condition  of  human  life.  It  is 
hardly  necessary  to  comment  on  the  obvious 
impossibility  of  the  continued  existence  without 
extraneous  recruiting  of  a  community  of  celi- 
bates. But  there  is  the  further  point,  that  the 
acceptance  in  a  community  of  the  doctrine 


BUDDHISM  187 

literally,  even  by  a  small  proportion  of  its 
members,  must  tend  by  heredity  towards  the 
elimination  of  a  belief  in  the  doctrine  ;  for  such 
men  will  leave  no  descendants  to  inherit  their 
barren  aspect  of  life.  Therefore,  if  the 
doctrine  of  celibacy  has  any  civilising  effect 
upon  a  community,  the  effect  cannot  be  of 
persistent  magnitude.  Catholicism  only  advo- 
cates the  doctrine  of  the  celibacy  of  the  priest, 
which  is  a  very  different  matter  from  the 
general  celibacy  that,  as  a  counsel  of  perfec- 
tion, underlies  Buddhistic  teaching. 

It  has  been  remarked  above  that  Buddhism 
is  a  peculiarly  selfish  religion.  That  is  a  very 
obvious  piece  of  criticism.  Indeed,  with 
regard  to  it,  we  may  say  that  every  religion 
in  a  sense  is  selfish — selfish,  that  is,  in  its  ulti- 
mate energising  motives  of  action.  Christianity 
thus  is  selfish  in  that  each  Christian  seeks 
ultimately  his  own  personal  salvation. 

In  this  argument  the  identity— if  it  exists — 
of  the  ultimate  bases  of  religious  motive  is  of 
very  little  importance  to  us  in  comparison  with 
the  visible  results  in  practice.  From  this  latter 
aspect  Buddhism  is  selfish  where  Christianity 
is  altruistic.  Therefore  Buddhism  works  for 
the  improvement  of  the  individual — which  is 
not  civilisation,  and  cannot  become  civilisa- 


188         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

tion — where  Christianity  works  for  the  com- 
munal improvement — which  always  tends  to 
become  civilisation  ;  and  so  here  again  we  see 
a  reason  why  Buddhism  has  produced  no 
period  of  civilisation  for  ever  memorable  in 
the  history  of  mankind. 

Buddhism  has  not  even  produced  isolated 
men  of  remarkable  ability — although  the  argu- 
ment does  not  seem  to  exclude  such  a  possi- 
bility— because  the  isolation  of  genius,  as  we 
know  from  the  general  history  of  civilisation, 
is  inconceivable.  The  man  of  genius  always 
is  the  son  of  the  civilisation  that  sways  the 
minds  of  the  men  around  him.  He  is  merely 
the  exponent,  the  fortunate  exponent,  of  the 
far  greater  social  intellectuality.  What  he  has 
said  or  done  had  to  be  said  or  done  somehow 
by  some  one.  It  is  the  genius  of  the  age  that 
speaks  or  acts  through  the  individual.  We 
know  that  a  Buonarotti  or  a  Shakespeare  could 
not  have  flourished,  say,  in  the  tenth  century, 
for  they  are  typical  sons  of  the  civilisation  that 
produced  them,  and  that  civilisation  was  not 
in  existence  in  the  tenth  century.  But  when 
the  civilisation  did  come,  it  was  bound  to  find 
an  outlet  for  its  intellectuality  somewhere  ;  it 
found  it,  almost  incidentally  we  may  say,  in 
these  two  individuals. 


BUDDHISM  189 

Similarly,  with  regard  to  Buddhistic  intel- 
lectuality, it  would  be  folly  to  suppose  for  one 
moment  that  the  casual  individual  could  give 
utterance  to  great  ideas,  could  perform  mighty 
actions,  when  the  social  spirit  of  civilisation 
was  not  alive  around  him,  and  instinct  with  the 
living  radiance  of  a  communal  intelligence. 
Buddhism,  being  anti-social,  as  we  have  seen, 
has  failed  to  produce  the  conditions  of  com- 
munal intellectuality  in  civilisation  that  are 
necessary  for  the  exposition  of  individual  men 
of  genius,  and  therefore  the  attempts  to  edu- 
cate such  individuals,  which  the  spirit  of 
Buddhism  may  be  said  to  have  been  making 
through  evolution,  have  been  in  fact  fruitless. 

In  these  desultory  remarks  upon  the  effects 
of  Buddhism  as  they  appear  to  a  casual 
observer,  we  have  confined  ourselves  to  the 
general  principles  of  Buddhistic  teaching,  and 
have  avoided  studiously  any  deviations  into  the 
particularities  of  existent  Buddhism.  Actually 
Buddhism  has  branched  of!  into  remarkably 
divergent  ramifications,  but  they  are  so 
numerous  that  any  attempt  to  discuss  their 
details  would  be  clearly  beyond  our  purpose. 
It  seems  better  to  leave  these  general  remarks 
in  their  present  indeterminate  vagueness. 

But  the  failure  of  evolution  to  extract  any 


190         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

real  civilisation  from  Buddhism,  in  spite  of  the 
numerous  attempts  to  do  so,  which  evidently  it 
has  made  in  producing  these  many  divergent 
types  of  Buddhistic  doctrine,  is  in  itself  of 
considerable  interest  to  us.  For  if  the  pro- 
duction of  civilisation  from  Buddhism  were 
possible,  then  these  divergent  types,  we  may 
presume,  would  never  have  come  into  exist- 
ence— at  any  rate,  they  would  not  have  attained 
to  such  an  advanced  state  of  divergency  as, 
in  fact,  they  have  reached  to-day.  Evolution 
would  have  detected  the  desirable  variation, 
and  the  particular  variety  then  would  have 
proved  prepotent  for  the  elimination  of  the 
other  less  desirable  variations.  It  would  have 
become  the  orthodox  Buddhism,  as  contrasted 
with  heretical  divergencies.  Orthodoxy  must 
not  be  taken  to  mean  any  rigid  conservation 
of  the  purest  principles  of  the  founder  of 
Buddhism.  Rather  it  is  orthodoxy  as  it  has 
been  evolved  in  the  history  of  the  Christian 
Church,  by  no  means  the  same  thing  as  a 
literal  realisation  of  the  earliest  Christian  type. 
In  this  sense  no  existing  branch  of  Buddhism 
has  any  right  to  claim  for  itself  the  title  of 
orthodox.  Buddhism,  indeed,  never  has  come 
into  a  position  similar  to  that  of  Christianity 
at  the  time  when  the  adolescent  Catholicism 


BUDDHISM  191 

was   stifling  out  of  existence  the   heresies  of 
divergent  forms  of  faith  in  Western  Europe. 

And  therefore  we  can  see  that  evolution  has 
been  unable  to  find  the  necessary  variation  in 
Buddhism. 

This  only  brings  us  back  to  our  former  con- 
clusion, that  Buddhism  is  not  capable  of 
generating  civilisation. 


CHAPTER    III 
ISLAM 

THE  history  of  Mohammedanism  ought  to  give 
us  a, very  obvious  example  of  the  civilising 
effects  of  psychic  illusion,  because  it  provides 
for  our  consideration  "  the  strange  spectacle 
of  a  religion  coming  into  being  in  the  clear 
light  of  day."  It  is  worth  our  while,  there- 
fore, to  try  to  see  why  Mohammedanism  failed 
to  produce  the  highest  form  of  civilisation. 
Also  we  may  try  to  grasp  the  connection 
between  the  illusion  and  the  form  of  civili- 
sation which  has  been  resultant  actually 
from  it. 

Mohammed  was  born  in  Mecca  about  A.D. 
571.  At  that  date  the  religious  beliefs  of 
the  Arabs  were  vaguely  polytheistic.  There 
was  no  hierarchical  system  of  faith  accepted 
by  the  people  with  sufficient  generality  to 
deserve  the  name  of  an  Arabian  religion.  The 
local  variations  of  belief  were  excessive.  Con- 

192 


ISLAM  193 

sequently  the  effects  of  psychic  illusion  upon 
conduct  in  any  locality  were  counteracted  con- 
stantly by  opposing  effects  in  neighbouring 
districts.  It  is  this  lack  of  homogeneity  that 
so  often  prevents  illusions,  which  in  themselves 
are  sufficiently  irrational  and  otherwise  not  un- 
suitable to  produce  a  system  of  civilisation, 
from  having  the  great  effects  upon  human 
history  that  we  might  have  anticipated.  This 
lack  of  homogeneity,  and  the  local  jealousies 
entailed  by  it,  must  have  tended,  also,  towards 
a  large  amount  of  scepticism,  because  each 
visit  of  an  individual  to  a  neighbouring  town 
or  tribal  community  must  have  led  him  to 
entertain  the  potentialities  of  doubt  as  to  the 
truth  of  the  illusions  which  he  had  accepted 
and  his  neighbour  had  rejected. 

The  sceptical  irreverence  of  the  mass  of  the 
Arabs  had  a  great  effect  upon  the  mind  of 
Mohammed  in  his  younger  days.  It  led  him 
definitely  to  reject  polytheism,  and  retain  only 
a  faith  in  Allah,  who  had  been  known  for 
a  long  time  to  the  polytheistic  Arabs  as  the 
nominal,  but  unapproachable,  supreme  God.  It 
is  of  no  consequence  in  our  present  inquiry 
whether  Allah  can  be  identified  with  Jehovah 
through  the  Hanifite  movement  and  Jewish 
Essenism  or  Christian  asceticism.  The  all- 

13 


194         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

important  point  for  us  is  that  Mohammed, 
by  rejecting  any  form  of  polytheism  and 
embracing  the  monotheistic  worship  of  Allah, 
came  into  possession  of  a  simple  and  satisfac- 
tory faith  which,  through  his  consummate 
genius,  could  give  the  homogeneity  of  a 
universally  accepted  psychic  illusion  to  the 
disparate  polytheistic  Arabs. 

Now  the  worship  of  Allah,  as  we  have  said 
already,  was  an  old-established  part  of  the 
existent  Arabian  polytheism  ;  so  that  Moham- 
medanism, if  it  had  been  content  to  teach 
merely  the  worship  of  Allah,  would  not  have 
gained  the  universal  consideration  of  the  Arabs. 
Mohammed  preached  more  than  the  worship 
of  Allah :  an  essential  part  of  the  Moham- 
medan creed  lies  in  the  psychic  illusion  of 
the  divine  guidance  of  the  prophet  himself. 
It  is  this  additional  statement  apparently  that 
has  produced  Mohammedan  civilisation,  or,  at 
any  rate,  led  to  its  extended  influence  after 
the  death  of  Mohammed.  It  gave  just  that 
desirable  humanity  to  the  pure  monotheistic 
teaching  of  Mohammed  himself— for  it  is  well 
known  that  Mohammed  expressly  forbade  his 
followers  to  look  upon  him  as  influencing  Allah 
on  their  behalf  after  his  death. 

Monotheism   in   itself   is   not   a   stimulating 


ISLAM  195 

form  of  faith— Christianity  found  this,  and 
therefore  evolved  saint-worship.  The  Moham- 
medan creed  has  remained  always  of 
an  unbending  transcendentalism.  Whatever 
Mohammed  personally  taught  or  wished  to 
teach,  in  actual  fact  his  followers  made  a 
second  or  intermediary  divinity  of  the  prophet. 
If  faith  in  Mohammedanism  was  to  dominate 
large  numbers  of  men,  it  was  necessary  that 
some  personal  myths  should  centre  round 
Mohammed  to  give  that  psychic  illusion  which 
hardly  could  be  excited  by  the  pure  worship 
of  Allah  even  in  the  desert — it  was  Renan  who 
said  that  the  desert  was  monotheistic.  So  we 
find  the  story  of  the  voice  on  Mount  Hira. 
It  is  of  no  importance  to  us  whether 
Mohammed,  in  the  course  of  some  cataleptic 
seizure  or  as  the  result  of  prolonged  and 
solitary  fasting,  really  believed  that  he  heard 
the  voice,  '*  Thou  art  the  messenger  of  God 
and  I  am  Gabriel.  .  .  ."  The  point  of  interest 
is  that  Mohammed  said  that  he  did  believe, 
and  persuaded  Khadijeh  to  believe  with  him, 
and  eventually  the  whole  Mohammedan  world. 
For  twenty  years  after  the  affair  of  Mount 
Hira,  in  Mecca  and  Medina  Mohammed  de- 
clared that  revelation  came  to  him  constantly. 
Those  who  believed  him  placed  themselves 


196         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

under  the  influence  of  the  psychic  illusion  of 
the  personal  interest  of  Allah  through  Moham- 
med in  their  affairs.  It  was,  indeed,  the  crucial 
point,  during  the  lifetime  of  Mohammed,  that 
believers  should  accept  the  illusion  of  the 
existence  of  Allah,  who  concerned  himself  with 
the  doings  of  Mohammed,  and  of  those  who 
accepted  Mohammed  as  a  prophet ;  for  it  was 
this  illusion  that  led  them  to  neglect  every 
other  thought,  in  the  belief  that  they  were 
fulfilling  the  fate  preordained  by  Allah. 

Mohammedanism  taught  the  psychic  illusion 
of  the  continuance  of  life  after  death,  and  we 
have  noted  the  importance  of  this  in  consider- 
ing how  the  Dionysiac  cult  gave  new  vigour 
to  the  Homeric  Olympianism,  and,  again, 
when  Christianity  was  growing  up  inside  the 
decadence  of  Greco-Roman  Olympianism. 

The  doctrine  of  predestination— Kismet:  "It 
is  fate  "—is  accepted  as  one  of  the  distinguish- 
ing traits  of  the  Mohammedan  religion ;  we 
might  be  inclined  to  suppose  that  the  full  appli- 
cation of  this  doctrine  in  the  motives  of  conduct 
would  annul  the  results  of  free  action  ;  but 
such  an  outlook  upon  Mohammedan  fatalism 
is  really  superficial.  No  doctrine,  no  form 
of  belief  can  destroy  the  common  basis  of 
humanity  that  is  inherent  in  all  men,  in 


ISLAM  197 

Mohammedan  Arabs  as  much  as  in  us.  The 
Mohammedan  has  as  much  freedom  of 
thought  as  all  other  men.  The  fact  that  he 
uses  this  freedom  very  largely  in  denying 
his  freedom  of  intellectual  action  does  not 
show  that  the  freedom  does  not  exist ;  on 
the  contrary,  the  denial  of  freedom  intellec- 
tually can  be  made  only  by  one  who,  in  fact, 
has  the  freedom  to  deny  that  he  has  the  neces- 
sary freedom  to  deny.  If  a  man  uses  his 
freedom  of  thought  to  deny  that  he  possesses 
freedom  of  thought,  ipso  facto  he  gives  the 
lie  to  his  denial.  It  follows,  then,  that  the 
power  of  Allah,  which  each  Mohammedan 
claims  to  be  the  controlling  guide  of  his  con- 
duct, obtains  its  ultimate  sanction  from  such 
intellectual  potentiality  as  the  believer  himself 
possesses  :  that  is,  each  man  arranges  his  con- 
duct as  actually  seems  best  to  himself.  The 
universality  of  the  entire  faith  in  the  personal 
controlling  power  of  Allah  produces  that 
wonderful  unanimity  of  conduct  which  has 
made  Mohammedanism  so  powerful  a  factor 
in  the  history  of  the  world  during  the  last 
twelve  hundred  years. 

After  the  Hegira,  or  flight  to  Medina,  A.D. 
622,  Mohammed  seems  to  have  taken  upon 
himself  more  completely  the  role  of  the  prophet 


198         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

inspired  by  the  direct  spoken  commands  of 
Allah.  This  must  have  tended  to  strengthen 
greatly  the  psychic  illusion  in  the  reality  of 
the  personal  interest  of  Allah  in  the  doings 
of  the  faithful ;  and  also  it  must  have  led 
to  an  increase  in  the  illusion  of  the  divine 
origin  of  the  teaching  of  Mohammed,  which 
would  be  all  in  favour  of  that  unquestioning 
obedience  to  the  expressed  commands  of  the 
prophet.  The  personality  and  the  example  of 
the  great  man,  also,  seem  in  themselves  to 
have  been  able  to  inspire  obedience  during 
his  lifetime  ;  but  after  his  death  it  must  have 
been  psychic  illusion  alone  that  kept  his 
followers  from  swerving  from  the  appointed 
path.  Also  the  early  successes  of  Moham- 
medans on  the  battlefield,  when  opposed  to 
the  legions  of  the  Roman  empire  and  the  forces 
of  Chosroes  of  Persia,  all  must  have  tended 
to  deepen  the  psychic  illusion  in  the  divine 
origin  of  Mohammedan  teaching. 

Apart  from  its  military  power,  the  resultant 
Mohammedan  civilisation  is  distinguished  for 
its  brilliant  successes  in  mathematical  and 
metaphysical  science— it  is  simply  impossible 
to  conceive,  as  has  been  noted  by  other  writers, 
that  our  modern  Christian  civilisation  could 
exist  without  the  Arabic  numerals.  As  we  have 


ISLAM  199 

seen  already,  in  considering  the  Olympian, 
the  Catholic,  and  the  Protestant  civilisations, 
monotheistic  illusions  seem  to  be  productive 
of  scientific  intellectuality,  while  polytheistic 
illusions  tend  to  lead  to  a  civilisation  re- 
markable for  literary  and  artistic  achievements. 
In  this  respect  Mohammedan  civilisation  does 
not  differ  from  the  resultants  of  the  other 
psychic  illusions.  Pure  Mohammedanism,  like 
pure  Protestantism,  is  eminently  monotheistic  ; 
and  its  resultant  civilisation  is  eminently  in- 
artistic :  in  architecture  alone  of  the  arts  has 
Mohammedanism  produced  any  masterpieces  ; 
and  architecture  is,  after  all,  the  most  utilitarian 
of  the  arts. 

Protestantism,  on  the  other  hand,  has  re- 
mained far  from  pure  in  its  monotheism,  being 
brought  constantly,  as  we  have  seen,  into  con- 
tact with  the  closely  related  polytheistic 
Catholicism.  It  is  this  purity  of  its  mono- 
theism that  has  prevented  the  Mohammedan 
civilisation  from  rising  to  the  many-sided 
grandeur  of  Protestant  civilisation.  Also,  the 
Protestant  civilisation,  being  chronologically 
the  later,  has  had  the  advantage  of  being  able 
to  learn  a  few  things  from  Mohammedan  civili- 
sation, especially  in  mathematics  and  meta- 
physics. The  Mohammedan  civilisation  did 


200         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

not  take  that  mechanical  turn  which  is  so 
remarkable  in  our  Protestant  civilisation. 
Perhaps  we  may  account  for  this  great  point 
of  difference  by  purely  physical  reasons,  which 
have  nothing  to  do  with  psychic  illusion ; 
geologically,  the  country  in  the  neighbourhood 
of  Mecca  is  not  rich  superficially  in  the 
minerals  that  are  necessary  for  mechanical 
eminence  ;  while  the  English,  who  have  been 
the  pioneers  of  mechanical  progress,  have  in 
their  country  a  land  that  is  peculiarly  endowed 
with  them.  England,  too,  as  we  have  re- 
marked, holds  a  unique  position  in  the  history 
of  Protestant  civilisation.  However  that  may 
be,  for  some  reason  or  other  the  Mohamme- 
dan civilisation,  in  spite  of  its  advanced 
theoretical  science,  did  not  show  signs  of  any 
special  mechanical  inventiveness. 

The  exclusiveness  which  is  so  intimate  a 
part  of  the  Mohammedan  faith  also  tended 
to  prevent  the  faithful  from  entering  upon  the 
heritage  incidentally  prepared  for  them  by 
civilised  polytheists  outside  the  bounds  of 
Islam.  To  Mohammedanism  this  must  have 
been  a  heavy  handicap  in  the  race  towards 
the  goal  of  civilisation,  where  the  other  com- 
petitor was  the  Protestant  monotheism,  which 
always  has  enjoyed  the  blessings  produced  by 


ISLAM  201 

the  adjoining  Catholic  polytheism  in  those  very 
things  which  pure  Protestantism  hardly  could 
have  produced  for  itself. 

Much  of  the  early  military  success  of 
Mohammedanism  was  due  to  the  weakness  of 
its  opponents  ;  and  this  weakness,  as  we  have 
said  above,  was  due  to  the  decadence  of  Roman 
Olympianism,  which  was  in  the  full  stream  of 
its  downward  course  while  Mohammedanism 
was  rising  to  power.  There  was  no  great 
internal  influence  which  Mohammedanism  had 
to  counteract,  such  as  met  Christianity  in  the 
disillusionment  of  Roman  Olympianism.  Thus 
Mohammedanism,  though  so  much  later  in 
origin  than  Christianity,  was  able  to  bring 
Mohammedan  civilisation  to  such  perfection  as 
was  possible  inherently  for  it  at  a  time  when 
the  decay  of  Olympianism  was  still  too  power- 
ful within  the  Roman  empire  to  permit  for 
Christianity  any  noticeable  resultant  effects  in 
civilisation.  Thus  from  the  middle  of  the 
eighth  to  the  middle  of  the  thirteenth  century, 
as  Renan  declares,  the  Moslem  world  was 
superior  to  the  Christian  world  in  intellectual 
culture.  The  ultimate  triumph  of  the  Christian 
civilisation  depends  essentially  on  the  fact  that 
Christianity  was  working  upon  material  pre- 
pared for  cultivation  by  Roman  Olympianism, 


202         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

upon  brain-material  which  possessed  an  heredi- 
tary latent  potentiality  of  civilisation  that  was 
lacking  almost  entirely  in  the  Arabs  and  early 
Mohammedans . 

There  are  three  prominent  assertions  in  the 
Mohammedan  psychic  illusion  :  (i)  that  Allah 
is  the  only  God;  (ii)  that  Mohammed  is  the 
prophet  of  Allah;  (iii)  that  Allah  through 
Mohammed  promises  a  second  life  of  bliss  after 
death  to  the  faithful.  Of  these  three  asser- 
tions the  first  two  have  no  great  civilising  power 
in  themselves.  Perhaps  the  chief  result 
achieved  by  them,  and  for  the  sake  of  which 
they  were  evolved  into  prominence,  was  the 
establishment  of  utter  uniformity  of  belief  so 
that  the  third  form  of  psychic  illusion,  faith 
in  the  promise  of  future  bliss,  might  have  its 
full  effect.  For  the  greater  the  homogeneity 
of  an  illusion,  the  greater  its  power  of  affect- 
ing the  conduct  of  large  masses  of  men.  We 
know  historically  that,  on  the  wholes,  homo- 
geneity has  been  a  constant  characteristic  of 
Mohammedanism.  The  Mohammedan  creed 
is  of  a  supreme  simplicity,  a  simplicity  that 
would  be  impossible  in  a  natural  religion  like 
Olympianism  ;  and  this,  again,  has  tended  to 
keep  Mohammedanism  homogeneous,  because 
any  variation  from  the  primitive  simplicity  was 


ISLAM  203 

to  be  seen  at  once,  and  was  condemned  forth- 
with as  heretical. 

We  may  say,  then,  that  faith  in  the  unity  of 
Allah  is  not  a  doctrine  of  supreme  import- 
ance as  a  civilising  agent  :  it  is  merely  a  most 
desirable  subsidiary  doctrine,  evolved  in  order 
to  aid  in  the  promulgation  of  the  third  distinc- 
tive doctrine  of  Islam,  that  Allah  through 
Mohammed  promises  eternal  bliss  after  life  to 
the  faithful.  In  discussing  other  religious 
systems  we  have  dwelt  upon  the  importance 
of  (he  psychic  illusion  in  immortality,  show- 
ing that  such  an  illusion  affects  the  conduct 
of.  believers,  giving  an  exciting  motive  to 
each  individual,  urging  him  towards  altruistic 
conduct  in  every  action  of  life.  Every 
Mohammedan  qua  Mohammedan,  in  effect, 
asks  himself  before  every  action  whether  his 
conduct  is  about  to  be  in  accordance  with  the 
precepts  of  the  Koran.  The  simplicity  of  the 
Mohammedan  creed  makes  the  application  of 
this  test  in  ordinary  life  an  easier  matter  than 
we  might  have  expected.  Also  the  homo- 
geneity of  Mohammedanism  makes  the  answers 
to  such  questions  singularly  free  from  varia- 
tion, so  that  the  whole  Mohammedan  world 
in  many  simple,  constantly  recurring  circum- 
stances of  daily  life  has  acted  with  uniformity. 


204          A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

The  effect  of  this  upon  racial  development 
must  have  been  great.  The  nature  of  the 
effect  depends  on  the  internal  quality  of  the 
particularities  of  Mohammedan  teaching.  We 
are  not  concerned  here  so  much  with  a  priori 
considerations  of  the  expediency  of  Moham- 
medan morality  ;  we  have  rather  to  remember 
that  such  moral  conduct  has  been  proved,  by 
its  success  up  to  a  certain  point,  to  be 
expedient. 

The  highest  civilisation  produced  by 
Mohammedanism  is  not  of  commanding  im- 
portance in  the  history  of  the  world.  It  is 
inferior,  certainly,  to  the  highest  forms  of 
Olympian  civilisation.  But,  reaching  its 
greatest  brilliance  at  the  time  when  Europe 
was  passing  through  the  dark  period  between 
Olympianism  and  the  glories  of  the  Catholic 
civilisation,  the  Mohammedan  civilisation 
seems  to  shine  with  a  splendour  that  for 
the  most  part  is  due  to  contrast. 

It  may  be  said  that  Mohammedan  civilisation 
largely  is  incidental,  that  it  is  due  to  the 
political  extension  of  Mohammedan  power. 
This  extension,  it  seems,  was  caused  in  no  small 
degree  by  the  proselytism  taught  so  insistently 
by  Mohammedanism,  and,  also,  directly  by/  the 
psychic  illusion  in  the  reality  of  the  paradisaic 


ISLAM  205 

rewards  that  awaited  the  believer  if  he  were 
killed  in  fighting  for  the  advance  of  Islam. 
This  is  an  aspect  of  the  third  statement  men- 
tioned above.  The  simplicity  of  this  psychic 
illusion  made  it  peculiarly  effective  in  influ- 
encing men,  especially  in  influencing  them  to 
action  that  tended  towards  Mohammedan 
political  advantage.  But  it  is  hard  to  see 
that  it  is  effective  directly  in  'civilising  men, 
that  it  is  conducive  to  intellectual  progress. 
It  lacks  the  gradations  of  rewards  for  which 
Catholicism  made  satisfactory  allowance  in  the 
psychic  illusion  of  purgatory.  The  Moham- 
medan result  is  an  uncompromising  dichotomy. 
But  Mohammedan  illusions  were  singularly 
effective  in  carrying  the  arms  of  the  faithful 
to  success  ;  and  it  seems  probable  that  here 
we  see  once  again  that,  when  material  security 
is  ensured,  civilisation  of  a  sort  tends  to 
increase. 


CHAPTER    IV 
CONFUCIANISM 

THE  records  of  the  primitive  religious  beliefs 
of  the  Chinese  are  so  vague  and  legendary  that 
it  is  not  possible  for  us  to  found  any  convincing 
argument  upon  them  :  we  can  do  little  more 
than  declare  the  existence  of  an  early  mono- 
theistic faith,  which  we  may  presume  preceded 
the  beginnings  of  Chinese  civilisation. 

In  the  long  period  of  the  Chou  dynasty 
(B.C.  1 122-255)  this  earlier  monotheism  seems 
to  have  been  developed  into  a  more  polytheistic 
and  anthropomorphic  illusion — a  faith  which, 
as  we  have  seen  so  often,  leads  to  a  higher  form 
of  civilisation.  Thus  Hou  Chi,  the  ancestor 
of  the  House  of  Chou,  was  worshipped  as  the 
"  Associate  of  God  "  ;  and  the  emperor  Shen 
Nung  was  deified  as  a  sort  of  Chinese  Ops, 
a  god  of  agricultural  labour.  And  sacrifices 
were  made  to  many  other  spirits.  Thus  with 

206 


CONFUCIANISM  207 

the    increase    of    psychic    illusion    came    the 
increase  of  civilisation. 

At  the  same  time  there  seems  to  have  arisen 
that  curious  limitation  which,  as  it  appears, 
is  of  very  great  importance  in  the  development 
of  Chinese  civilisation,  the  limitation  to  the 
emperor  alone,  as  Son  of  Heaven,  of  the  power 
of  sacrificing  to  God  and  to  Earth.  The  im- 
portance of  this  is  twofold.  It  stimulated  a 
psychic  illusion  in  the  right  of  the  emperor  to 
unquestioning  obedience  from  his  subjects  :  to 
this  further  reference  will  be  made.  Also  it 
reduced  the  psychic  illusion  of  the  popular 
belief  in  the  real  personality  of  a  deity  by 
separating  ordinary  people  from  unreserved 
communion  with  heaven.  This  must  have 
tended  to  weaken  the  influence  of  the  supreme 
psychic  illusion  upon  the  conduct  of  men  by 
cutting  them  off  from  personal  participation  in 
the  direct  intercourse  between  the  individual 
and  his  deity.  No  doubt,  for  a  reason  that  we 
do  not  know,  the  increase  of  the  authority  of  the 
emperor  must  have  been  at  some  period  of  such 
evolutionary  importance  that  the  establishment 
of  the  psychic  illusion  of  his  "  divine  right  " 
was  worth  evolving  in  spite  of  the  unsatisfac- 
tory fact  that  it  entailed  at  the  same  time  the 
establishment  also  of  a  secondary — and  almost 


208         A  THEORY  OF   CIVILISATION 

a  disqualifying— illusion.  It  reminds  one  of 
the  evolution  through  sexual  selection  of 
beautiful  but  cumbersome  plumage  in  many 
birds,  which  must  be,  beyond  doubt,  a  serious 
hindrance  to  their  flight  in  their  ordinary  move- 
ments, which  to  us  might  seem  to  be  more 
important,  for  the  sake  of  an  ulterior  and  quite 
essential  purpose.  Similarly  the  evolution  of 
a  straightforward  psychic  illusion  in  some 
heavenly  guidance  might  seem  to  us  to  be  the 
more  important  :  but  to  the  spirit  of  evolu- 
tion, so  to  speak,  on  the  contrary,  it  was  even 
worth  while  to  sacrifice  some  part  of  this  for 
the  sake  of  establishing  a  divine  right  in  the 
authority  of  the  emperor,  which  appears  to 
us  far  less  essential  than  the  confirmation  of 
spiritual  faith.  But,  in  the  final  outcome,  it 
seems  that  China  has  lost  more  by  the  limita- 
tion which  weakened  the  pure  psychic  illusions 
of  Chinamen  than  she  has  gained  by  any 
increase  of  political  illusion.  Every  observer 
remarks  upon  the  materialistic  utilitarianism 
of  the  average  Chinaman,  and  this  utilitarian- 
ism is  one  of  the  most  marked  features  of  the 
teachings  of  Confucius  (B.C.  551-478),  to 
which  we  may  now  turn. 

Of    all    the    great    religions    of    the    world 
Confucianism    is     the    least    religious ;      that 


CONFUCIANISM  209 

is,  it  makes  the  least  claim  of  a  revealed 
heavenly  guidance.  Confucius  never  claimed 
that  he  was  more  than  an  ordinary  man, 
whose  object  was  to  lay  before  his  country- 
men the  examples  of  former  men  as  guides 
to  their  present  conduct.  The  strength 
and  the  weakness  of  Confucianism  both 
lie  concealed  in  this  negation  of  spiritual 
guidance.  The  Confucian  civilisation  is  weak 
in  that  it  is  lowly,  that  it  never  has  risen,  and 
in  itself  never  can  rise,  to  great  heights  ;  for 
Confucianism  teaches  almost  none  of  that 
psychic  illusion  which  can  inspire  conduct 
opposed  to  personal  interest  in  favour  of  com- 
munal progress.  It  is  strong  because,  in 
mounting  only  to  a  lowly  level,  it  is  clear 
largely  of  the  possibilities  of  disillusion,  and 
consequent  decadence.  Where  the  European 
civilisations  in  the  past  have  risen  to  greater 
heights  they  have  fallen  again  ;  while  Con- 
fucianism has  pursued  the  easy  level  path, 
which,  though  it  never  had  led  Chinamen  to 
the  heights  which  Europeans  have  trodden,  has 
saved  them  at  any  rate  from  such  depths  of 
anarchy  as  we  read  of  in  the  histories  of  the 
first  centuries  of  the  ages  of  faith  in  Europe. 
And  yet  Confucianism  did  teach  a  little  faith 
in  illusion  ;  otherwise  it  would  have  preached 

14 


210         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

lessons  to  which  men  soon  would  have  paid  no 
attention,  because  it  would  have  given  no 
motive  for  any  altruistic  behaviour.  It  did 
this,  not  so  much  by  claiming  divine  guidance 
for  its  founder  as  by  pointing  behind  him, 
vaguely  enough,  to  predecessors  who  had 
received  revelations  from  some  deity.  Con- 
fucius himself  claimed  to  be  no  more  than  a 
student  of  these  somewhat  misty  predecessors, 
whose  doctrines  and  precepts  he  taught.  Still, 
the  Chinese  treat  Confucius  as  a  more  than 
human  character ;  they  offer  incense,  fruit, 
wine,  before  a  tablet  on  which  prayers  to  Con- 
fucius are  written.  Here  we  see  that  little 
piece  of  psychic  illusion  which  has  given  a 
necessary  motive  for  impersonal  conduct.  The 
universality  of  this  worship  paid  to  Confucius 
throughout  China  produced  the  catholicity  of 
motive  which  alone  could  have  enabled  so 
small  a  tinge  of  psychic  illusion  to  colour  so 
large  a  field.  Confucianism  has  given  to  China 
her  extraordinary  unity. 

Confucius,  too,  by  preaching  very  emphatic- 
ally the  former  existence  of  a  golden  age  when 
everybody  was  virtuous,  was  adding  a  sub- 
sidiary illusion,  which,  though  apparently 
almost  universal  throughout  the  world  as  a 
basis  of  religion,  and  so  of  civilisation,  seems 


CONFUCIANISM  211 

actually  to  have  had  more  influence  in  China 
than  elsewhere.  For  Confucius  claimed  that, 
by  obedience  to  the  principles  which  he 
taught,  an  immediate  return  to  the  primitive 
felicity  might  be  secured.  He  was  thus  led  to 
lay  emphasis  on  the  political  aspect  of  religious 
conduct.  There  appears  to  be  no  way  in  which 
motives  for  conduct  that  was  not  self-seeking 
could  be  found  here  except  under  the  impulse 
of  some  form  of  psychic  illusion.  It  is  the 
poverty,  however,  of  this  illusion  that  has  kept 
China  from  rising  above  her  present  lowly  level 
of  civilisation. 

When  we  look  more  closely  into  the  details 
of  the  Confucian  system,  we  see  again  that 
illusion  is  kept  as  far  as  possible  from  the 
hearts  of  the  people  by  the  rule  that  the 
worship  of  a  supreme  deity  is  to  be  performed 
by  the  emperor  alone  on  behalf  of  himself  and 
of  his  subjects.  In  theory  the  worship  of 
ancestors  alone  is  permitted  to  the  ordinary 
Confucianist. 

In  practice,  of  course,  endless  superstitions 
are  countenanced :  but  their  heterogeneity 
nullifies  their  influence  to  a  great  extent :  they 
are  not  systematised  by  Confucianism.  A 
catholicity  of  belief,  as  we  have  seen  so  often 
elsewhere,  is  necessary  to  bring  about  the 


212         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

greatest  results  of  psychic  illusion.  In  so  far 
as  it  is  catholic,  Confucianism  teaches  no  great 
amount  of  psychic  illusion  :  in  so  far  as  it  does 
not  forbid  superstitions  that  are  capable  of 
giving  the  desirable  quantity  of  illusion,  Con- 
fucianism is  not  catholic. 

Confucius  taught  that  heaven,  by  fixing 
spiritual  laws  to  the  performance  of  every 
social  function,  had  defined  once  and  for  all 
the  proper  natural  relations  of  man.  From 
our  present  point  of  view  this  is  important 
only  from  the  illusion  that  it  was  some  heavenly 
power  that  had  arranged  such  matters,  because 
it  implies  the  existence  of  the  psychic  illusion 
which  ultimately  must  underlie  every  religion, 
even  the  practical  utilitarianism  of  Con- 
fucianism. 

It  was  taught  insistently  by  Confucius  that 
the  emperor  is  the  "  Son  of  Heaven,"  and  this 
doctrine  of  his  brought  psychic  illusion  to  bear 
closely  upon  his  utilitarian  politics.  We  can 
use  the  title  very  glibly,  as  though  it  were,  in 
fact,  nothing  more  than  a  conventional  title  ; 
but  it  seems  Confucianism  intends  believers 
really  to  mean  something  definite  by  it.  Thus 
disobedience  of  the  emperor  is  for  the  Con- 
fucian sin  against  heaven.  This  psychic  illu- 
sion, if  once  accepted,  unreservedly,  might 


CONFUCIANISM  213 

come  without  doubt  to  have  enormous  political 
significance  in  the  hands  of  a  clever  and  not 
over-scrupulous  emperor.  Historically  such 
power  seems,  for  the  most  part,  to  have 
descended  into  the  hands  of  chancellors. 
Philosopher-kings  are  rare.  But  the  illusion 
of  "  divine  right,"  when  brought  into  prac- 
tical politics  as  the  teaching  of  Confucius 
brings  it,  opens  enormous  possibilities  of  per- 
sonal power.  Applying  exactly  the  same 
principle  to  the  individual,  Confucius  made 
reason  emperor  of  the  mind  of  each  man,  and 
established  this  principle  under  the  psychic 
illusion  of  the  divine  inspiration  of  reason 
within  each  individual,  which  was  to  guide  him 
upon  the  way  of  righteousness. 

Confucianism  has  never  produced  a  really 
great  man.  When  one  thinks  of  the  vast 
population  of  China,  and  the  remarkable 
liberality  of  its  choice  of  officials  by  competi- 
tive examination,  the  dearth  of  commanding 
personalities,  indeed,  may  seem  surprising : 
but,  in  fact,  it  ought  not  to  surprise  us  :  such 
great  men  do  not  arise,  as  it  were,  by  chance 
in  any  part  of  the  world.  They  are  all  sons  of 
their  environment.  It  is  not  the  quantity  but 
the  quality  of  the  material  that  is  of  supreme 
importance  in  their  making.  Confucianism  is 


214         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

not  an  inspiring  creed  because  it  teaches  so 
little  psychic  illusion  :  men  are  not  inspired 
by  it  to  the  irrational  magnificent  actions  which 
foreshadow  a  coming  period  of  intellectuality. 
So  we  find  no  great  period  of  intellectuality  in 
the  history  of  Chinese  civilisation.  There  is 
merely  a  long  wearisome  succession  of  toler- 
ably intelligent  officials.  The  motive  of  a  high 
intellectuality  is  lacking  in  Confucianism, 
because  psychic  illusion  to  such  a  great  extent 
is  lacking.  So  it  seems  that  Confucianism  in 
itself  cannot  lead  to  that  sudden  expansion 
of  intellectuality  in  China  which  some  people 
in  Europe  seem  to  dread,  as  the  coming  of  a 
Yellow  Peril.  Before  our  European  civilisation 
has  to  meet  that  danger,  it  will  be  necessary  for 
China  to  find  an  enlarged  psychic  illusion.  It 
is  conceivable  that  this  new  illusion  may  be 
evolved  from  Confucianism,  much  in  the  way 
that  Christianity  was  evolved  from  Judaism  : 
but  the  parallel  is  not  close  ;  and  there  are  no 
signs  at  present  of  any  such  evolution— none, 
at  any  rate,  that  are  obvious  to  those  who  know 
nothing  of  the  internal  economy  of  the  Chinese 
empire. 

Although  Confucianism  is  the  accepted 
religion  of  vast  numbers  of  Chinese,  we  must 
remember  that  the  teaching  of  Confucius  does 


CONFUCIANISM  215 

not  stand  alone  in  China.  Buddhism,  since  its 
introduction  in  the  third  century  B.C.,  has  had 
a  very  strong  hold  upon  large  sections  of  the 
population.  Buddhism  in  China  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  the  pure  Buddhism  that 
we  considered  in  Chapter  II.  For  here,  as 
for  the  most  part  elsewhere,  it  became  de- 
based ;  no  doubt  this  happened  so  that  evolu- 
tion by  an  increase  of  psychic  illusion  might 
develop  from  it  the  germs  of  an  incipient 
civilisation,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  are  hardly 
to  be  found  where  the  teachings  of  Gotama 
remain  in  their  philosophic  purity.  As  we  have 
discussed  Buddhism  already,  here  we  need  only 
say  that  it  appears  prooable  that,  in  so  far 
as  Buddhism  can  be  said  to  have  influenced 
China  as  a  whole,  it  has  tended  towards 
civilisation,  by  preaching  psychic  illusion  of  a 
sort  where  that  was  lacking  peculiarly  in 
Confucianism. 

Similarly  Taoism  has  added  some  desirable 
illusions  in  China.  The  teachings  of  Lao  Tsu 
are  philosophic  :  their  appeal  is  to  the  dis- 
illusioned, who,  after  giving  up  even  the  limited 
superstitions  of  Confucianism,  yet  could  accept 
the  remote  unity  of  the  Tao  as  a  "  First  Cause." 
In  practice  very  numerous  superstitions  have 
grown  up  round  the  doctrines  of  Lao  Tsu  : 


216         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Taoists  appear  to  have  developed  psychic 
illusion  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  Taoism  came 
into  existence  in  order  to  deny  the  influence  of 
all  psychic  illusions. 

It  is  difficult  to  understand  the  position  of 
those  Chinese  who  succeed  in  combining  Con- 
fucianism with  Buddhism  ;  but,  at  any  rate,  it 
is  clear  that  the  resultant  illusion  must  be 
largely  arbitrary :  so  that  here  we  see  the 
failure  of  the  necessary  universality  of  a 
psychic  illusion  that  is  to  produce  great  results. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Confucianism 
as  a  religion  has  not  led  to  great  results  in 
civilisation,  in  spite  of  the  vast  numbers  who 
have  accepted  its  teaching  for  a  protracted 
period  of  time.  It  is  of  great  interest  to  the 
man  who  accepts  the  religious  causation  of  all 
civilisation  to  note  that  the  one  thing  lacking 
for  the  building  up  of  a  great  civilisation  in 
China  has  been  universal  acceptance  of  a 
psychic  illusion  which  Confucianism  did  not 
teach.  It  is  a  negative  argument  in  favour  of 
the  necessity  of  psychic  illusion  for  the  pro- 
duction of  civilisation  ;  and  it  has,  no  doubt, 
the  usual  weakness  of  negative  arguments.  But 
analogically  there  is  support  for  our  theory  in 
the  study  of  Confucianism. 


CHAPTER    V 
ANCIENT  MEXICO   AND   PERU 

FROM  the  point  of  view  of  our  theory  it  is 
unfortunate  that  Columbus  discovered  America, 
at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century.  In  the 
first  place,  his  enterprising  achievement  would 
take  a  much  more  convenient  place  in  the 
course  of  the  Protestant  civilisation  than  it 
occupies  as  one  of  the  very  great  triumphs  of 
the  Catholic  civilisation.  For  the  artistic  civi- 
lisation that  resulted  from  Catholicism  was  not 
naturally  prolific  of  such  exploits.  The  adven- 
ture might  have  seemed  to  belong  more  fit- 
tingly to  some  date  a  couple  of  centuries  or  so 
later,  when  the  scientific  and  mechanical  Pro- 
testant civilisation  was  coming  into  power.  Of 
course,  it  is  easy  to  find  sufficient  explanation 
of  the  phenomenon  in  the  increase  of  general 
intellectuality  which  was  the  necessary  con- 
comitant of  artistic  pre-eminence. 

From    a    very   different    point    of   view   the 

217 


218         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

enterprise  of  Columbus  also  must  be  regretted 
by  us,  because  it  brought  about  the  ruin  of  the 
two  native  civilisations  of  America,  by  opening 
the  eyes  of  the  Spaniards  to  the  golden  glories 
of  Mexico  and  Peru. 

In  the  year  1519,  when  Cortes  reached  the 
shores  of  the  Mexican  empire,  the  Aztecs  had 
attained  to  a  degree  of  culture  to  which  we  can 
hardly  refuse  the  name  of  civilisation.  This 
civilisation  had  been  developed  in  an  indepen- 
dence that  was  isolated  completely  ;  that  is,  the 
three  States  of  Mexico,  Tezcuco,  and  Tlacopan, 
which  dominated  the  affairs  of  Anahuac,  had 
developed  their  culture  without  extraneous  help, 
although  evidently  their  closely  related  civili- 
sations had  affected  one  another  mutually. 

Now  the  isolation  of  this  group  of  advanc- 
ing communities  made  it  possible  for  them  to 
work  out  in  practice  an  "  ideal  "  civilisation,  to 
which  the  civilisations  of  the  old  world  can 
give  us  no  historical  parallel.  This  is  not  the 
place  to  discuss  the  possibilities  of  pre- 
Columbian  intercourse  between  America  and 
Europe  or  Asia.  For  us  here,  certainly,  the 
Mexican  civilisation  may  be  considered  indi- 
genous, for  the  racial  connection  that  it  appears 
to  be  possible  to  trace  between  the  American 
Indian  and  the  Asiatic  Mongol  is  quite  archaic. 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         219 

The  ruined  cities  of  Yucatan  point  to  the 
existence  of  some  civilisation  which  preceded 
by  a  long  period — the  length  of  the  period, 
indeed,  is  a  mere  matter  of  speculation — the 
civilisation  that  Cortes  found  in  Mexico.  This 
earlier  period  of  civilisation  was  connected  most 
probably  with  the  later  growth  of  Mexican 
civilisation  ;  but  the  connection  historically  is 
lost.  Indeed,  for  us  from  our  present  point  of 
view,  the  Aztec  civilisation  was  a  primitive 
civilisation.  Perhaps  it  had  not,  in  fact,  many 
civilised  precursors  in  its  national  ancestry. 

Now  this  "  ideal "  civilisation  might  have 
been  of  quite  absorbing  interest  to  the  student 
of  the  philosophic  development  of  history.  It 
is  true  that  we  could  never,  unseen,  have 
watched  it  developing  itself  from  barbarism 
through  an  adolescent  culture  to  the  strenuous 
manhood  of  its  highest  cultivation,  and  passing 
from  that  height  down  the  normal  stages  of 
decadence  into  senility.  But  at  least  we  might 
have  hoped  to  obtain  a  clear,  distinct  view  of 
that  one  period  at  which  the  conquerors  came 
into  contact  with  it  four  hundred  years  ago  ; 
we  might  have  hoped  that  the  Europeans,  who 
had  advanced  so  much  farther  upon  the  road 
of  civilisation,  would  have  preserved  with 
scrupulous  care  every  record  that  the  Aztec 


220         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

culture  had  stored  in  its  hieroglyphic  archives 
of  the  history  of  its  people.  But  unhappily 
such  hopes  are  not  realised.  Juan  de 
Zumarraga,  the  first  archbishop  of  Mexico, 
gathered  the  priceless  picture-manuscripts  from 
every  quarter  of  Anahuac  into  a  "  mountain- 
heap,"  and  burned  them  publicly.  And  so  we 
have  to  be  content  with  such  historical  notices 
as  we  possess — especially  the  writings  of 
Sahagun  and  Ixtlilxochitl. 

Now,  let  us  consider  the  psychic  illusions  of 
the  Aztecs.  The  Aztecs  recognised  the  exist- 
ence of  a  supreme  Creator  and  Lord  of 
the  universe  (Prescott:  Conquest  of  Mexico, 
book  i.  chap.  iii.).  Beneath  this  somewhat 
vague  and  very  far-distant  Father  Omnipotent 
was  a  group  of  thirteen  leading,  and  numerous 
minor,  deities,  "  mostly  deifications,"  as  Spence 
says  (Mythologies  of  Mexico  and  Peru, 
chap,  ii.),  "of  his  attributes."  It  would  seem 
that  the  illusion  of  the  All-father  was  not  of 
special  importance  in  the  evolution  of  Mexican 
civilisation.  At  any  rate,  the  potent  deities, 
who  guided  the  growth  of  Aztec  civilisation  as 
we  know  it,  are  not  to  be  held,  in  any 
individual  case,  as  occupying  a  position  of 
almighty  sovereignty.  The  Mexican  religion 
is  thoroughly  polytheistic. 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         221 

The  deity  in  whom  the  psychic  illusion  of 
the  people  appears  to  have  been  developed 
most  highly  was  Huitzilopochtli,  the  war-god. 
No  doubt  it  was  their  complete  faith  in  this 
deity  that  gave  the  necessary  illusion  which 
enabled  the  Aztecs  to  seize  and  hold  their 
commanding  position  in  Anahuac — for  it  seems 
that  they  brought  their  faith  in  Huitzilopochtli 
with  them  when  first  they  came  into  that 
region.  As  far  as  that  is  concerned  the  posi- 
tion is  exactly  similar  to  the  ancient  Roman 
faith  in  Bellona  and  Mars  with  Jupiter  titu- 
larly  supreme  in  the  background — unreserved 
psychic  illusion  in  personal  war  gods.  Such 
illusion  must  be  of  enormous  value  to  a  primi- 
tive people  in  fighting  against  those  in  whom 
such  illusion  is  non-existent  or  weaker. 

Again,  Huitzilopochtli  gave  an  illusion  that 
was  of  importance  to  the  community  rather 
than  to  the  individual ;  and  this  tallies  exactly 
with  the  fact  that  Huitzilopochtli  was  a  deity  in 
whom  the  illusion  was  established  before  the 
Aztec  dominance  of  Anahuac. 

The  worship  of  Huitzilopochtli  is  notorious 
for  the  horrible  bloodshed  connected  with  the 
human  sacrifices  offered  to  him  in  almost 
incredible  numbers — seventy  thousand  victims, 
we  are  told,  were  slaughtered  at  the  dedication 


222         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

of  his  great  temple  in  A.D.  1486.  But,  putting 
sentiment  aside,  we  may  see,  without  much 
trouble,  that  the  unsentimental  spirit  of 
Mexican  evolution  was  the  gainer  by  the 
destruction  of  foes  who  were  not  imbued  with 
the  illusion  of  the  reality  of  Huitzilopochtli. 
That,  in  fact,  is  the  important  point — the 
elimination,  whether  in  war  or  by  sacrifice,  of 
those  who  failed  to  accept  the  illusion  so  as  to 
leave  room  for  the  growth  and  expansion  of 
the  community  whose  members  were  imbued 
by  it  fully. 

The  fact  that  there  was  revolting  cruelty 
and  cannibalism  bound  up  with  the  ritual 
of  the  worship  of  Huitzilopochtli  must  not 
blind  us  to  the  possibility  that  his  worship 
may  have  been,  nevertheless,  a  civilising  factor. 
Really  we  ought  to  distinguish  very  clearly 
between  our  criticism  of  the  internal  features 
of  this  form  of  religious  belief — indeed  of  all 
forms  of  religious  belief — and  our  estimate  of 
the  external  value  of  it.  The  "  internal  "  criti- 
cism is  subjective,  and  has  its  interest  almost 
entirely  in  the  subjective  condition  of  the 
criticising  mind,  as  influenced  by  the  psychic 
illusions  under  whose  influence  it  has  been 
formed.  Thus  such  criticism— it  is  apt  to  be 
sentimental— is,  in  this  case,  a  critical  estimate, 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         223 

or  criterion,  of  the  contemporary  Christian  civi- 
lisation which  inspires  such  critical  feelings.  It 
cannot  be  a  veritable  criticism  of  the  worship 
of  Huitzilopochtli :  with  regard  to  that  it  would 
be  merely  an  interesting  opinion.  Sentimental 
feelings  are  here  not  out  of  place. 

But  when  we  turn  to  the  "  external  "  side  of 
our  consideration  of  the  worship  of  Huitzilo- 
pochtli, the  estimate  that  ,we  can  make  of  it 
then  is  a  very  different  matter.  We  are  con- 
cerned no  longer  with  the  outraged  feelings 
that  so  completely  fill  our  minds  when  we  think 
of  the  repulsive  cruelties  that  attended  the 
human  sacrifices  ;  we  turn  rather  to  the  effects 
that  appear  to  have  resulted  from  the  psychic 
illusion  in  the  reality  of  Huitzilopochtli  upon 
the  development  of  the  believers  in  it.  From 
this  point  of  view  the  horrors  of  his  wor- 
ship may  appear  desirable,  as  conducive  to 
civilisation. 

If  we  banish  all  sentimental  bias  from  our 
estimate,  we  are  left  only  with  the  consider- 
ation whether  the  cult  of  Huitzilopochtli  was 
leading  his  worshippers  towards  the  favourable 
differentiation  which  is  a  step  towards  civili- 
sation. It  seems  indeed  that  his  worship  must 
have  had  the  effect  of  differentiating  favour- 
ably those  who  believed  in  it  from  disbelieving 


224         A  THEOEY  OF  CIVILISATION 

neighbours,  by  increasing  irrational  courage 
and  a  scorn  of  death.  Where  the  faith  in 
Huitzilopochtli  was  strong  enough  his  wor- 
shippers must  have  fought  with  complete  self- 
abandonment  and  disregard  of  their  own  lives 
against  their  enemies,  and  this  must  have 
tended  to  increase  the  power  of  the  Aztecs. 

We  have  not  yet  seen,  it  may  be  said,  that 
an  increase  in  the  power  of  his  Aztec  believers, 
through  faith  in  Huitzilopochtli,  necessarily 
would  cause  an  increase  in  their  civilisation. 
But  is  it  not  true  that  increase  of  communal 
power  does  tend  in  itself  to  produce  an  increase 
of  intellectual  vigour,  which  leads  in  the  direc- 
tion of  civilisation,  quite  apart  from  other  con- 
siderations? And  here — as,  for  the  most  part, 
under  similar  circumstances  in  other  religions 
—there  were  numerous  auxiliary  forces  tending 
in  the  same  direction.  The  most  remarkable 
of  these  forces  was  the  illusion  of  Quetzalcoatl. 
44  Quetzalcoatl,"  says  Spense,  "  stood  for  a 
worship  which  was  eminently  more  advanced 
and  humane  than  the  degrading  and  san- 
guinary idolatry  of  which  Huitzilopochtli 
and  Tezcatlipoca  were  the  prime  objects." 
Tezcatlipoca,  it  may  be  said,  is  to  be  regarded 
as  the  brother  of  Huitzilopochtli. 

We  are  told  that  Quetzalcoatl  was  a  god  of 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         225 

one  of  the  older  peoples  of  Anahuac,  whose 
civilisation  preceded  that  of  the  Aztecs.  But 
his  great  interest  does  not  lie  merely  in  this 
semi -historic  aboriginality.  No  doubt  there 
were  many  such  deities,  whose  very  names  are 
lost  for  ever.  Why,  then,  was  it  that  this  god 
was  selected  to  retain  a  prominent  position  in 
Mexican  mythology?  Surely  it  was  because 
there  could  be  evolved  through  him  as  a 
central  figure  by  means  of  psychic  illusion 
those  civilising  qualities  which  were  weak  in 
Huitzilopochtli  and  his  kindred,  and  they  could 
be  brought  thus  to  a  speedier  maturity. 
Huitzilopochtli  gave  the  material  strength  to 
the  empire  of  the  Aztecs  ;  Quetzalcoatl  gave 
the  spiritual  qualities  which  form  such  a 
desirable  complement  to  the  ferocity  of 
Huitzilopochtli. 

It  seems  probable  that  the  illusion  of  Quet- 
zalcoatl was  enabling  evolution,  so  to  say,  to 
reach  more  quickly  the  goal  for  which  it  was 
striving  already  by  the  establishment  of  the 
worship  of  Huitzilopochtli.  Quetzalcoatl  was 
too  mild  a  deity  to  lead  alone  a  barbarous  tribe 
amid  barbarous  suroundings  up  the  path  of 
civilisation.  Therefore,  necessarily,  in  Aztec 
civilisation  Huitzilopochtli  had  to  precede  him. 
We  may  say  that  these  two  psychic  illusions 

15 


226         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

produced  Mexican  civilisation.  There  are,  as 
has  been  observed,  any  number  of  other  deities 
in  the  Mexican  mythology,  but  Huitzilopochtli 
and  Quetzalcoatl,  being  the  most  prominent 
of  them,  may  be  taken  as  typical  e>f  all ;  there 
is  no  need  for  us  to  consider  the  others  in 
detail. 

But  the  psychic  illusion  of  Quetzalcoatl,  as 
contrasted  with  that  of  Huitzilopochtli,  really 
is  of  peculiar  interest,  for  it  places  in  con- 
venient embryonic  juxtaposition  the  two  germs 
from  which  in  combination  a  life  of  culture 
and  high  intelligence  might  have  been  formed 
— if  Columbus  had  not  discovered  America. 
Of  course,  speculations  on  the  probable  out- 
come of  Mexican  civilisation,  if  it  had  been 
left  to  develop  itself  in  isolation,  are  idle 
enough.  There  were  too  many  forces  at  work, 
whose  power  we  cannot  estimate.  By  analogy 
we  may  presume  that  disillusion  soon  would 
have  made  itself  felt,  and  we  may  imagine, 
from  what  we  know  of  the  aim  of  evolution, 
that  by  some  means  disillusion  would  have 
proved  especially  deadly  to  Huitzilopochtli  and 
his  blood-stained  compeers,  because,  in  the 
meanwhile,  they  would  have  completed  for  the 
time  their  material  task  of  making  the  Aztec 
empire  practically  invincible  among  its  neigh- 


ANCIENT   MEXICO   AND   PERU         227 

hours.  Then  Quetzalcoatl,  the  culture-deity, 
might  have  become  the  leading  god  and  have 
produced  a  brief  period  of  real  civilisation. 
But  without  the  material  support  of  Huitzilo- 
pochtli, Qftetzalcoatl  probably  would  have 
fallen  soon — if,  indeed,  he  could  have  escaped 
the  contagion  of  that  disillusion  which  killed 
Huitzilopochtli.  Then  the  whole  culture  would 
have  slipped  back  to  barbarism.  But  bar- 
barism with  a  difference,  barbarism  with  a 
potentiality  of  a  new  and  greater  growth — just 
as  there  was  potentiality  in  the  barbarism  of 
the  ruined  and  disillusioned  Roman  empire,  a 
potentiality  which  has  given  us  the  civilisation 
of  Christendom  to-day. 

But  to  return  to  Quetzalcoatl.  There  is 
quite  a  close  analogy  between  him  and  Apollo. 
Both  were  sun -gods  ;  both  were  culture -gods. 
Also  Apollo,  as  we  noticed  above,  was  not  a 
true  Roman  deity,  but  an  Hellenic  deity,  and 
rose  to  power  in  Rome  after  the  indigenous 
Roman  deities  had  finished  their  task  of  giving 
to  Rome  her  commanding  material  position 
in  Latium  and  Italy :  similarly  Quetzalcoatl 
was  not  a  true  Aztec  deity,  but  seems  rather 
to  have  been  waiting  to  expand  his  influence 
until  Huitzilopochtli  had  finished  his  work  of 
making  the  Aztecs  brave  and  hardy  enough  to 


228         A  THEORY  OP  CIVILISATION 

defy  all  resistance.  Of  course  the  analogy 
must  not  be  pressed  too  far  :  the  introduction 
of  the  Hellenic  Apollo  into  Italy  was  in  no 
way  comparable  to  the  apparent  pre- Aztec 
dominance  of  Quetzalcoatl  in  Anahuac.  But 
surely  it  is  worthy  of  note  that,  in  the  two 
adolescent  civilisations  so  widely  sundered  by 
the  ocean,  we  find  the  primitive  dominance 
of  the  psychic  illusions  in  such  gods  as  Mars 
and  Huitzilopochtli,  while,  under  their  protec- 
tion as  it  were,  the  illusions  of  extraneous 
culture -deities,  Apollo  and  Quetzalcoatl,  were 
strengthening  their  own  hold  upon  the  minds 
of  men. 

The  dominance  of  Quetzalcoatl  in  Anahuac, 
though  it  was  very  far  from  being  an  absolute 
sovereignty  over  the  intellects  of  the  inhabi- 
tants, was  not  without  influence.  We  can  see 
this  in  the  artistic  craftsmanship  of  the  Aztecs. 
Here,  as  usual,  a  comparatively  high  artistic 
power  is  coupled  with  polytheistic  worship- 
that  is  a  combination  that  recurs  too  often  to 
be  accidental. 

The  priests  undoubtedly  were  the  most 
highly  cultured  class  in  Anahuac.  We  may 
find  a  similar  state  of  affairs,  indeed,  in  any 
adolescent  condition  of  society  anywhere  ;  for 
the  priest  is  brought  more  continuously  under 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         229 

the  influence  of  psychic  illusion  than  the  lay- 
man :  we  do  not  find  it  so  often  after  the 
civilisation  of  a  community  is  reaching 
maturity  ;  for  the  tide  of  disillusion  by  that 
time  often  has  set  in  among  the  priesthood 
when  we  cannot  detect  its  existence  elsewhere. 
The  priests  of  Anahuac,  also,  were  very 
numerous,  a  fact  that  points  to  a  widespread 
complete  acceptance  of  psychic  illusions.  Con- 
sequently the  whole  educational  system  of 
Anahuac  was  in  their  hands,  just  as  the  educa- 
tional system  of  Europe  was  in  the  hands  of 
the  Catholic  priesthood  during  the  Middle 
Ages  and  the  period  of  the  Catholic  civilisa- 
tion. Here,  too,  then,  we  may  note  the  instruc- 
tive analogy  by  which  evolution  assists  the 
growth  of  psychic  illusion  in  secondary  ways, 
by  establishing  such  systems  of  sacerdotal 
education. 

The  priests-had  reached  quite  a  high  level  of 
intelligence— their  astronomical  knowledge  was 
advanced  and  exact,  so  that  their  calendar 
would  only  err  by  one  day  in  five  hundred 
years  (Prescott:  Conquest  of  Mexico,  book  i. 
chap.  iv.).  Surprise  often  is  felt  that  such 
knowledge,  implying  a  not  inconsiderable  re- 
finement, should  be  found  in  conjunction  with 
what  seem  to  us  to  be  the  diabolic  cruelty 


230         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

and  sanguinary  horrors  of  human  sacrifices  and 
cannibalistic  feasts.  But  is  such  surprise 
justifiable?  After  all,  the  most  horrible 
cruelties  were  perpetrated  in  Europe  under  the 
Inquisition  by  men  who  at  the  very  same  time 
were  rejoicing  in  all  the  glories  of  the  Catholic 
civilisation.  It  seems  rather  that  our  modern 
unfailing  sensibility  in  such  matters  largely  is 
an  outcome  of  Protestantism.  But,  if  we 
remember  that  the  principles  of  evolution  are 
not  affected  in  the  slightest  degree  by  senti- 
mental notions — how  strong  are  the  animistic 
ideas  in  us  which  make  it  so  easy  to  forget  that 
at  times  ! — we  may  realise  that  cruelty  and 
cannibalism  might  be  used  incidentally  by 
evolution,  just  as  much  as  other  practices  that 
seem  to  us  under  modern  influences  to  be 
virtuous  or  immoral,  in  order  to  strengthen 
psychic  illusion  and  thus  promote  civilisation, 
quite  apart  from  any  personal  notions  we  may 
have  as  to  their  virtue  or  their  immorality.  We 
know  that  Nature  can  be  utterly  cruel :  we  can 
see  that  in  any  country  walk  we  may  take  : 
but  it  would  be  the  idlest  folly  to  say  on  that 
account  that  Nature  is  damnable.  Our  feel- 
ings in  such  matters  have  been  evolved,  for 
some  reason  or  other,  into  a  condition  that 
clashes  continually  with  the  proceedings  of 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         231 

Nature.  So  with  regard  to  these  Mexican 
sacrifices,  damnable  though  they  may  seem  to 
us,  it  does  not  follow  that  they  are  damnable 
from  a  natural  point  of  view.  The  truth  is 
that  we  cannot  free  ourselves  here  for  a 
moment  from  our  own  psychic  illusions,  which 
tell  us  that  cruelty  is  a  form  of  vice.  The 
illusion,  no  doubt,  is  a  desirable  one  for  us, 
for  it  is  fixed  with  undeniable  tenacity  in  our 
minds.  It  seems  not  to  have  been  a  desirable 
illusion  at  all  times  in  all  men  :  certainly  it 
was  not  so  in  the  evolution  of  Mexican  civilisa- 
tion at  the  period  of  the  Spanish  conquest.  If 
we  can  accept  this  statement  of  the  case,  we 
can  come  to  realise  that  what  seems  to  us  to 
be  quite  abominable  cruelty  may  not  be  incom- 
patible with  a  degree  of  social  development 
that  certainly  may  be  called  civilisation. 

The  civilisation  which  Pizarro  found  and 
destroyed  in  Peru,  "  although  in  many  ways 
analogous  to  that  of  the  Aztecs,  was  strangely 
dissimilar  in  some  of  its  aspects"  (S pence : 
The  Mythologies  of  Ancient  Mexico  and  Peru). 
There  are  ruins  scattered  through  Peru  which 
point  clearly  to  some  anterior  civilisation  in 
the  same  district — just  as  there  are  similar 
prehistoric  ruins  in  Yucatan  telling  of  pre- Aztec 


232         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

civilisation.  Of  this  earlier  civilisation  we 
know  nothing.  We  may  conjecture  naturally 
enough  that  the  Peruvian  civilisation,  which 
the  Spaniards  found  in  existence,  was  evolved 
from  the  disintegration  of  this  older  social 
advance. 

The  Peruvian  civilisation  of  the  sixteenth 
century  of  our  era  was  theocratic.  The 
emperor,  the  Inca,  was  looked  upon  as  the 
divine  representative  of  the  sun.  Psychic  illu- 
sion thus  had  deified  an  ordinary  man,  so  that 
the  people  unreservedly  and  generally  accepted 
the  belief  in  the  ultimate  difference  between 
the  Inca  and  themselves.  The  divinity  of  the 
Inca  extended  also  to  his  kinsmen,  though  in  a 
lesser  degree.  We  have  not  here  to  consider 
the  little-known  details  of  the  origin  of  this 
strange  belief  in  the  divinity  of  a  living  man. 
Let  us  try  rather  to  see  theoretically  how  such 
a  psychic  illusion  would  affect  communally 
those  who  had  faith  in  it.  If  the  community 
clearly  could  gain  by  it,  even  such  an  utterly 
irrational  illusion  certainly  could  have  been 
evolved.  We  are  compelled  here,  as  so  often 
elsewhere,  to  study  the  effects,  and  from  them 
to  deduce  the  causes. 

We  may  note  first  that  the  Peruvian  empire, 
from  its  isolated  position  between  the  moun- 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         233 

tains  and  the  ocean,  was  quite  remarkably 
secure  from  the  danger  of  invasion.  Conse- 
quently the  evolution  of  Peruvian  civilisation 
was  directed  towards  internal  improvements 
rather  than  towards  means  of  external  offence 
and  defence.  Thus  no  great  war -god,  like 
Huitzilopochtli,  dominates  Peruvian  mythology, 
which  at  the  time  of  the  Spanish  conquest 
happened  to  have  been  tending  from  an  older 
polytheism  towards  a  monotheism  that  sanc- 
tioned only  a  worship  of  the  sun  in  the  person 
of  the  Inca.  We  need  not  suppose  that  the 
Peruvians  never  had  to  fight  for  their  empire, 
although  they  were  not  a  distinctively  warlike 
and  aggressive  people  like  the  Aztecs.  The 
illusion  of  the  divinity  of  the  Inca  was  suffi- 
cient in  itself  to  give  the  necessary  irrational 
stimulus.  Still,  the  spirit  of  Peruvian  evolu- 
tion was  curiously  introspective  at  the  period 
when  it  becomes  known  to  us.  The  result  of 
this  is  that  the  internal  economy  of  Peruvian 
government  has  a  special  interest. 

The  political  arrangements  of  Peru  were  very 
highly  organised :  indeed,  psychic  illusion 
seems  to  have  been  used  here  chiefly  for  the 
increase  of  the  efficiency  of  their  organisation. 
We  may  see  that  any  psychic  illusion — in  Peru 
the  illusion  of  the  divinity  of  the  Inca — which 


234:         A  THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

tended  to  improve  the  internal  economy  of  the 
State,  would  be  favoured  by  evolution  through 
the  improved  conditions  of  life  which  such 
illusions  would  bring  about  amongst  those 
people  who  accepted  it.  Thus  in  the  cultiva- 
tion of  the  ground  a  highly  organised  society 
would  compel  people  to  labour  with  more 
effective  diligence  than  an  ill -organised  society. 
This  would  increase  the  supply  of  food  pro- 
duced by  the  country.  Thus  the  population 
of  a  highly  organised  society  would  increase 
in  numbers  owing  to  the  increased  means  of 
livelihood  resulting  from  the  increased  supply 
of  food :  for  the  numerical  strength  of  a 
population  varies  with  the  increase  and 
decrease  of  the  food-supply.  Thus  the  psychic 
illusion  of  the  divinity  of  the  Inca  would  tend 
to  enlarge  the  population  of  Peru  to  a  greater 
number  than  it  would  have  reached  otherwise. 
The  empire  of  the  Inca  thus  would  gain  greatly 
in  power,  as  contrasted  with  savage  and 
barbarous  tribes  round  about. 

However,  these  tribes,  as  we  have  noted 
above,  were  apparently  neither  sufficiently 
numerous  nor  sufficiently  strong  thus  to  affect 
conclusively  the  internal  form  of  Peruvian 
economy.  We  must  seek,  then,  an  auxiliary 
internal  cause  :  and  this  we  find  in  the  local 


ANCIENT  MEXICO  AND  PERU         235 

internal  variations  which  must  have  become 
prominent  in  an  empire  so  large  and  so  moun- 
tainous as  that  of  the  Inca,  especially  where 
intercommunication,  though  apparently  well 
arranged,  was  conducted  entirely  on  foot,  for 
the  Peruvians  had  no  beasts  of  burden.  These 
local  internal  variations  would  tend  to  set  one 
province  of  the  empire  above  another — ulti- 
mately as  the  result  of  variations  in  the  strength 
of  the  psychic  illusion.  The  imperial  organisa- 
tion then  would  favour  the  district  that  varied 
advantageously— for  the  government,  though 
stern,  was  fatherly — at  the  expense  of  the 
district  which  varied  disadvantageously  :  and 
thus  the  local  variations  would  tend  always 
to  increase  the  efficiency  of  the  organising  force 
behind  the  whole  empire.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  disfavour  of  an  Americind  government 
would  be  a  drastic  thing. 

To  manage  such  a  highly  organised  State  as 
Peru  it  was  necessary  that  a  very  efficient  body 
of  men  should  be  in  control  of  the  government. 
Such  a  body  was  found  in  the  Inca  caste, 
which  possessed  by  birth  the  hereditary  sanc- 
tion of  a  divine  origin  ;  for  it  shared  with  the 
Inca  himself  the  glory  of  an  accepted  racial 
descent  from  the  sun.  The  efficient  power  here 
was  founded  directly  upon  psychic  illusion. 


236         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

The  actual  organisation  of  this  remarkable 
form  of  government  really  was  bureaucratic- 
bureaucratic  without  a  bureau.  It  is  quite 
instructive  to  observe  that  this  was  the  form 
of  political  control  evolved  in  a  country  that 
was  peculiarly  free  from  foreign  invasion  and 
the  accidents  of  war.  For  a  bureaucracy  is 
the  worst  form  of  government  conceivable  for 
the  management  of  war.  Is  that  the  reason 
why,  with  a  general  increase  of  pacific  prin- 
ciples in  Europe  at  the  present  time,  the  forms 
of  European  government  all  are  tending  to 
become  more  and  more  bureaucratic? 


CONCLUSION 

ACCORDING  to  the  theory  so  feebly  adumbrated 
in  the  preceding  pages,  we  are  living  at  the 
present  time  in  a  civilisation  that  is  in  direct 
relation  to  the  Protestant  form  of  Christianity. 
Our  civilisation  is  the  result  of  the  religion 
that  preceded  it  or  synchronised  with  its  earlier 
stages,  just  as  we  have  seen  that  previous  civi- 
lisations in  Europe  resulted  from  previous 
forms  of  psychic  illusion.  The  Hellenic 
culture  was  the  outcome  of  faith  in  the 
religion  of  Hellas,  the  Roman  culture  the  out- 
come of  faith,  in  the  Hellenised  religion  of 
Rome,  the  Catholic  culture  of  the  Renaissance 
the  outcome  of  faith  in  the  Catholic  form  of 
Christianity  ;  similarly  our  modern  civilisation 
in  England  is  the  outcome  of  faith  in  the  Pro- 
testant form  of  Christianity.  What,  then,  is 
to  be  the  outcome  of  the  future  ? 

There  is  a  charm  in  prophecy  because,  if 
we  make  the  realisation  sufficiently  distant,  we 
cannot  be  proved  to  be  wrong  by  facts  that 


237 


238         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

defeat  the  prognostication.  The  whole  ques- 
tion of  the  future  history  of  civilisation  is 
indeed  so  complex  that  the  problem  is  in  a 
sense  insoluble — insoluble,  that  is,  if  we  seek 
to  enter  into  details  ;  it  is  only  in  the  vaguest 
of  generalities  that  we  can  hope  to  plot  out 
the  course  of  the  future. 

It  is  evident  in  this  matter  of  prophecy  that 
we  ought  first  to  try  to  detect  in  what  direction 
the  lines  of  progress  have  been  leading  in  the 
past ;  only  then  can  we  hope  to  discover  the 
direction  that  they  are  likely  to  take  in  the 
coming  time.  It  seems,  then,  most  essential  to 
find  out  upon  what  general  principle  civilisa- 
tion has  been  evolved.  Such  a  principle  must 
exist,  if  only  we  can  detect  it,  because  all 
Nature  works  under  definite  laws  which  cannot 
be  broken.  If  civilisation  has  been  evolved 
up  to  the  present  time  upon  a  certain  prin- 
ciple, it  will  continue  to  be  evolved  upon  the 
same  principle  as  long  as  humanity  possesses 
any  kind  of  culture  that  can  be  called  civili- 
sation. The  attempt  has  been  made  in  the 
previous  pages  of  this  book  to  show  that  the 
civilisations  of  Western  Europe  and  other 
localities  have  resulted  from  certain  psychic 
illusions  which  have  dominated  the  minds  of 
men  from  time  to  time,  and  to  which  we  give 


CONCLUSION  239- 

the  name  of  religion.  If  this  be  true,  if  religion 
be  the  cause  of  civilisation^  it  follows  that  it 
is  in  the  .study  of  religion  that  we  must  hope 
to  find  the  guiding  lines  which  will  show  us 
whither  our  civilisation  is  taking  us.  As  other 
periods  of  civilisation  have  grown,  have 
reached  a  climax,  and  have  then  declined,  so 
too  our  present  civilisation  must  surely  decline 
when  it  has  lost  the  driving  force  that  has 
raised  it  to  its  greatest  possible  height*  There 
seems  to  be  ;io  sufficient  reason  to  suppose 
that  our  present  civilisation  is  different  in  kind 
from  earlier  civilisations.  It  is  easy  to  look 
in  a  complacent  way  at  the  wonders  of  civilised 
life  around  us,  and  to  point  out  particular 
facts  that  appear  to  foreshadow  a  permanent 
solidarity  in  the  present  state  of  human 
culture ;  but,  if  we  agree  that  the  source 
of  fuel  for  the  engine  is  coming  to  an  end, 
we  cannot  but  see  that  the  end  of  the  working 
power  of  the  engine  is  not  far  off ;  and  that 
is  quite  independent  of  the  fact  that  the  present 
horse-power  of  the  engine  is  higher  than  ever. 
The  question,  then,  seems  to  simplify  itself. 
Is  the  psychic  illusion  of  Protestantism/  or, 
rather,  is  the  psychic  illusion  of  Christianity, 
a  living,  growing  force  in  the  minds  of  men? 
Or  is  it  a  spent  or  moribund  force?  As  we 


240         A  THEORY   OF  CIVILISATION 

answer  that  alternative  so  it  seems  we  must 
answer  the  question  of  the  future  of  European 
civilisation. 

Two  points  at  once  occur  to  the  mind. 

The  universality  of  modern  civilisation, 
spread  practically  over  all  the  world,  makes 
its  position  different  from  that  of  any  former 
civilisation.  But  does  it  indeed  make  so  much 
difference?  Surely  a  quantitative  distinction 
of  this  kind  can  never  make  that  qualitative 
distinction  which  is  implied  in  the  statement. 
A  quantitative  distinction  may  lead  to  a  greatly 
protracted  delay  in  the  course  of  dissolution, 
but  it  cannot  per  se  become  the  qualitative 
distinction  which  alone  could  alter  dissolution 
into  a  rejuvenated  growth.  The  carcass  of 
an  elephant  will  take  longer  to  decay  than 
the  carcass  of  a  mouse,  but  the  process  is  the 
same,  and  the  final  result  is  the  same.  Quan- 
tity and  quality  are  in  different  planes  ;  at  the 
most  they  can  affect  each  other  only  accident- 
ally, not  essentially.  The  conclusion  surely 
must  be  that  increased  size  does  not  make  for 
real  permanence  in  our  civilisation,  but  rather 
for  a  protraction  of  the  period  of  decadence, 
and  only  for  that.  This  conclusion  is  very 
different  from  that  reached  by  many  acute 
thinkers  from  whom  it  is  rash  to  differ.  But 


CONCLUSION  241 

even  the  paltry  thoughts  of  a  poor  thinker, 
such  as  are  given  here  to  the  reader,  may 
have  a  value  if  they  goad  greater  minds  into 
taking  the  trouble  of  crushing  them. 

The  second  point  which  occurs  in  this  con- 
nection is  of  a  different  nature,  qualita- 
tive rather  than  quantitative.  Even  if  psychic 
illusion  has  been  the  exciting  cause  of  civili- 
sation, or  an  exciting  cause,  cannot  civilisation 
come  to  occupy  such  a  position  that  it  no  longer 
has  need  of  this  cause  to  enable  it  to  retain 
the  position  to  which  it  has  attained?  This 
is  really  a  much  more  subtle  objection  because 
it  rests  upon  a  hypothesis  which,  evidently, 
we  are  unable  either  to  verify  or  to  refute. 
We  do  not  know  that  we  have  attained  or  are 
attaining  to  such  a  position ;  it  is  true,  also, 
that  we  do  not  know  that  such  a  position  is 
unattainable.  The  answer  to  this  question,  then, 
can  rest  only  upon  probabilities.  Ultimately 
it  appears  that  it  can  rest  only  upon  the  his- 
torical analysis  of  earlier  civilisations.  If 
earlier  civilisations  can  be  shown  to  have  come 
into  existence,  and,  having  reached  a  climax, 
to  have  entered  upon  a  period  of  decadence, 
which  always  has  been  arrested  only  by  the 
power  of  a  new  psychic  illusion,  is  there  not 
a  probability  that  our  present  civilisation,  in 

16 


242         A   THEORY   OF   CIVILISATION 

the  same  way,  having  reached  its  climax,  must 
enter  upon  a  period  of  decadence,  which  only 
can  be  arrested  by  the  establishment  of  a  new 
psychic  illusion  ?  Our  present  theory  can  give 
no  further  answer  to  the  question.  To  the 
present  writer  personally  it  seems  that  the 
answer  implied  must  be  accepted,  that  the  only 
hope  of  arresting  the  inevitable  decadence  is 
the  establishment  of  a  new  psychic  illusion, 
which  must  be  of  such  a  kind  that  it  can 
sway  the  minds  of  men  with  the  practical 
universality  of  the  previous  great  psychic 
illusions. 

This  raises  the  further  question  of  the  nature 
of  this  potential  psychic  illusion  of  the  future. 
One  is  inclined  to  think  that  the  new  illusion 
cannot  be  yet  another  form  of  Christianity ; 
it  hardly  appears  conceivable  that  any  new 
version  of  the  Christian  faith  can  come  to 
dominate  the  modern  civilised  world  with  the 
unquestioned  sway  which  is  demanded.  It 
seems,  too,  that  the  new  religion  must  be 
founded  on  irrationality,  so  that  rational  self- 
seeking  motives  may  have  the  least  possible 
influence  upon  conduct.  In  order  to  reach 
this  condition  our  present  civilisation  must 
enter  upon  a  long  period  of  decadence  to 
reduce  the  present  intellectuality  to  a  level  at 


CONCLUSION  243 

which  men  can  accept  the  irrational  universally 
and  unreservedly. 

Analogy  would  incline  us  to  localise  the  new 
religion  on  the  outskirts  of  the  Christian  civi- 
lisation, and  therefore  necessarily  in  Asia  or 
Africa.  The  spirit  of  evolution  will  have  no 
sentimental  prejudices  about  the  colour  of  skin. 
Apparently  we  should  exclude  from  our  choice 
of  probable  localities  any  non-Christian  coun- 
tries that  have  accepted  the  Christian  civili- 
sation, and  have  thus  been  Christianised  in 
everything  but  nominal  faith. 

As  to  the  date  of  the  beginning  of  the 
Protestant  disillusion  and  decadence,  or  again 
as  to  the  date  of  the  coming  of  the  new  religion, 
men  can  say  nothing  with  certainty  until  they, 
look  back  upon  the  Christian  civilisation  as  we 
look  back  upon  the  Olympian  civilisation.  That 
they  will  look  back  so,  analogy  seems  to  leave 
no  doubt.  Even  as  we  look  back  from  the 
height  of  our  civilisation  to  Greece  and  Rome, 
so  they  will  look  back  to  us  from  some  far 
greater  height  which  we  cannot  even  dimly 
foreshadow. 

It  is  important  for  us  to  try  to  realise  that 
civilisation  is  a  natural  growth,  not  the  artificial 
work  of  a  personal  deity  ;  it  is  natural  just  as 
the  specific  growth  of  the  human  animal  is 


244         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

natural.  Civilisation  represents  the  specific 
variation  by  which  humanity,  at  any  time,  in 
any  place,  has  secured  the  superior  variant 
strain  through  which  it  has  been  evolved  into 
a  position  higher  than  that  occupied  by  those 
who  did  not  secure  such  a  variant.  That  the 
variation  is  mental,  rather  than  physical,  makes 
no  difference  to  the  reality  of  its  subjection 
to  natural  laws  ;  for  brains  are  subject  to  the 
same  evolutionary  laws  as  the  rest  of  our 
animal  nature. 

It  is  easy  to  neglect  that  truth,  to  think  of 
thought  as  if  it  had  some  sort  of  independent 
reality.  There  is  no  evidence  to  show  that 
intellectual  progress  is  not  evolved  on  the  same 
general  principles  as  corporal  progress.  But 
thought  has  difficulty  in  theorising  upon 
thought,  civilisation  has  difficulty  in  theorising 
upon  civilisation  ;  for  one  is  misled  easily  into 
mistaking  unimportant  particularities  for  im- 
portant generalities.  We  see  shadow-figures 
mingling  with  real  figures,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  distinguish  shadow  from  reality  ;  for  often 
they  are  much  alike.  But  if  we  follow  a 
shadow,  keep  it  under  constant  observation 
even  for  no  very  long  time,  we  find  that  it 
becomes  attenuated,  and  at  last  is  lost  in  the 
darkness.  It  is  not  so  when  we  follow  reality. 


CONCLUSION  245 

Reality  cannot  be  lost  if  we  keep  our  gaze 
fixed  upon  it. 

Well,  then,  if  our  theory  is  false,  it  melts 
away  like  a  shadow,  and  is  seen  no  more.  But 
if  it  is  true,  it  cannot  be  lost  to  sight ;  it  only 
waits  for  him  who  surely  will  come — and  may 
he  come  soon— to  turn  upon  it  the  light  of 
knowledge. 

But  at  any  rate  in  this  way  we  can  see  dimly 
a  solution  to  the  problem  which  must  occur 
both  to  the  religious  man  and  to  the  agnostic, 
the  problem  of  the  practical  universality  of 
religious  feelings  and  beliefs  throughout  the 
past  history  of  mankind.  The  Christian  must 
wonder  at  the  widespread  acceptance  of  faiths 
which  he  holds  to  be  untrue,  must  wonder  that 
his  God  has  permitted  this  vast  extension  and 
dominance  of  error.  The  agnostic,  too,  must 
marvel  at  the  completeness  of  the  sway  which 
religion  in  its  various  forms  has  held  over 
the  minds  of  men.  The  belief,  indeed,  in  the 
continuance  of  the  life  of  the  soul  after  death 
has  become  by  secular  insistence  upon  its  truth 
a  difficult  thing  to  deny.  But  if  religion  is 
taken  to  have  been  evolved  in  order  that  human 
progress  in  civilisation  might  be  evolved,  the 
difficulty  finds  a  solution.  Religious  belief 
becomes  the  stepping-stone  by  means  of  which 
animality  advances  to  humanity. 


246         A  THEORY  OF  CIVILISATION 

Without  doubt  it  is  a  difficult  matter  to  study 
our  personal  religion  from  an  impersonal  point 
of  view.  Yet  evidently  an  explanation  is  de- 
manded, both  by  Christian  and  non-Christian, 
of  the  universality  of  various  forms  of  faith. 
If  religion,  apart  from  any  substratum  of  literal 
truth  in  its  dogmas,  has  evolved  itself  as  a 
means  to  the  evolution  of  that  higher  mentality 
which  finds  its  expression  in  civilisation,  it  is 
evident  that  its  universality  finds  an  explana- 
tion in  our  theory  that  is  quasi-biological. 

No  advance  in  a  biological  evolutionary  pro-^ 
cess  can  be  final.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  essen- 
tial that  such  advance  lead  either  to  a 
further  advance  or  to  retrogression.  But  the 
advance  may  be  indirect,  the  retrogression 
direct.  It  seems  to  follow  here  from  what  has 
been  said  that  civilisation,  as  we  find  it  around 
us  now,  must  soon  enter  upon  a  course  where 
movement  will  be  directly  retrogressive,  but 
also  upon  a  course  wherein  some  indirect  path 
will  be  found  leading  ultimately  to  an  advance 
far  beyond  the  point  we  have  reached  to-day. 


Ube  (3re0bam  press 

UNWIN  BROTHERS,  LIMITED 
WOKING  AND  LONDON 


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